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I enjoy making the sounds for these things.
Maybe it’s a bit of a macabre career choice,
but there’s always a new way to make somebody die.
That sounds horrible but it’s true.
Hunted is about the sense of being lost in the world.
And not like literally lost where you need a map,
but just lost in the way that you get overcome
and you really believe that you’re there.
The goal for me is to try and get the player
to be excited about what’s around the corner.
You know, what’s happening next, what can I find?
What’s going to make the hairs on the back of my neck tingle, you know?
We talk about that a lot with the music.
The vibe of the score is powerful.
I mean, if you look at the main characters of the game,
even the female, she’s pretty with it,
pretty brutish-looking, very strong, powerful.
So I wanted to convey that in the music, so there’s a lot of choir,
a lot of brass and a lot of percussion.
And as far as modern elements go,
I have created a decent amount of sounds
for the score to help convey
an uneasiness in the world
and in the levels that they traverse through in the game.
I’m never going to say no to that.
I mean there’s a lot of weaponry, a lot spell casting
and a lot of hyper crazy kind of sound.
But in general, the overall approach is very ambient
and kind of creepy, maybe a little bit horror in places.
I mean, I’m a big fan of bowing anything, like a cello bow.
Whether it be a metal tin, a gate,
you know a pot from the kitchen.
And you pitch them real low down and you put some reverb and delay on it
and it creates a decent tension for the game.
Every sound in the game is designed.
There's nothing like a stock library sound in this game.
So every single sound, even like the small impacts
of the wood breaking as a body falls into it.
You know, a multi-layered sound, of like
crunchy stuff up top and then this stuff up here.
These things make really great whooshes.
For like the arrows as they pass by your head.
That's how you make them.
- Cutting it close there.
Ooh, a good death rattle?
I’ll take chocolate syrup and tomato paste
and corn syrup and I’ll mix it all together
and just like stick a mic in there and
[makes nasty, meaty sounds]
You know, make some really cool beefy sounds
and then when that stuff, like, splatters
and you hear it after you kill, that’s really satisfying.
Because you want to hear, you want to imagine the blood spattering on the ground.
If you’re into that sort of thing.
- He knows I don’t think about that.
- I never think about that.
A lot of the nostalgia of the old dungeon crawly games
was all about the magic mouth giving you the riddle,
or you find the runes written on the wall
and you translate them into some mysterious riddle.
What we want to do is give that same kind of fun like,
“Ah! I figured it out!”
Or, “I’ve been thinking about it all night
and I woke up in the morning with the answer.”
We wanted the puzzles of our game to blend into the mythology
and blend into the environments and be true to where they are.
You know, you may break through a wall and find out
there’s a huge other area behind it that you didn’t know existed.
And those are all over our world.
The sense of discovery and all of the emotions
that walking down those dark corridors invoke
is really, to me, sort of the essence of the foundation
of what these games are built on.
Because your responsibility is to give people what they’re looking for.
But once you’ve done that, then you’ve got to give them some things they didn’t expect.