overview
music more than 60 minutes of soundtrack
sound design more than 500 sound effects
Project description
Unrailed is a co-op multiplayer game where you have to build a railway track across endless procedurally generated worlds. Master random encounters with its inhabitants, upgrade your train and keep it from derailing!
I was asked to make music and sound design for this game together with Mathilde Hoffmann.
We wanted to let the music fit the look and character of the game. So we decided going for an overall happy style and a sound palete of dry acoustic / orchestral and retro electronic sounds using lots of rhythmic patterns to symbolize the track building mechanic from the game.
Take a look at ‚more project information‘ for more detailed descriptions of what we did.
Take a listen to two track snippets of the score:
more project information
Because you as a player cross different worlds in the game (like alps, desert, snow, lava and even space) we wanted to have different kinds of music tracks for each of those worlds.
And because we really wanted to make the music as diverse as possible so that you could listen to it over and over again we also decided to have different music versions depending the current weather situation in-game. So when it randomly rains the music changes to a more ‚rainy version‘, when an earthquake appears the music will become very crazy and detuned. For the night versions we recorded our own voices, made a software instrument and created.
All those music versions were then implemented using the middleware FMOD.
Having such a complex soundtrack lead to the decision that the sound design has to stay a bit more in background to give enough space for all the music. But of course you have certain situations where you definitely need the acoustic feedback – like when you sucessfully connect a piece of rail or when your tools are going to disappear on the left side of the screen or when your train is close to crash. Those important sounds we then made a bit more snappy or louder like the other less important ones like the running train or the ambiences.
For the space biome we decided to do something more special by letting the player hear only the sounds connected to the players body like hitting things or collecting stuff – like it would sound in real space.
Mathilde also gave a very nice talk about how we made the music:
To get a small insight into the game you can watch this teaser trailer over here:
Here’s a short demonstration of the ingame sound design we’ve created: