Christian vasselbring, the audio designer, collected a lot of empty cigarette boxes and put them on his desk. He couldn’t explain why he hoarded cigarettes, but he thought it would come in handy one day.
With the Swedish studio trasier starting to make the horror game Little Nightmares II, the time has come for wasserberg to discover. At the hospital level, the team designed a group of hairy, manikin like patients who tried to grab the player and squeak as they walked. Vaseline realized that the cigarette boxes he collected were very suitable for making the patient’s footsteps, so he recorded the sound of his beating on the cigarette boxes.
“A lot of useful sounds are recorded like this. I’m lying on a big bed, putting my hand into a cigarette case and holding my breath at the same time.” Wasserberlin said.
Like many other horror games, the excellent sound design plays an important role in the fear of Little Nightmares II The story of Little Nightmares II takes place in a nightmare like world, without any dialogue between characters and almost no words on the screen. In this case, the development team can only create a tense atmosphere through sound and art design to arouse the emotions of the players. In order to find the best sound and effect for the game, wasserberg and several colleagues had to be creative and iterative.
“There’s sound everywhere in the game. It won’t be completely quiet for a moment.” The buzzing of flies and the sound of water drops are very slight, while others are noisy and terrible. For example, in a chase scene in the early stage of the game, the audio designer used to bump and rub the violin bow with the mini guitar to make a harsh sound.
In Little Nightmares II, it’s hard for you to draw a clear line between music and ambient sound effects, which the development team intended to do: the two are mixed, so that the game world gives players a distorted feeling. According to wasserberg, most of the sound sources come from a free sound library. Audio designers mix different sounds and edit them. Sometimes, an audio clip can be the result of up to 20 sounds superimposed together.
“It’s like building bricks, or cooking ingredients, that you can use to create new sounds.”
One of the most challenging tasks for the sound team is to record and dub all the characters in Little Nightmares II. Instead of hiring professional dubbing actors, Tarier let the staff play in person. Even the main AI designer once gave a voice to one of the main characters of the game.
“It may be hard for you to imagine that all the children’s voices in the game come from adults.” “We didn’t record any children’s voices,” says Tobias Lilja, a senior audio designer.
The role of Wasselin in dubbing is not only a school teacher, but also the main enemy of the school gate, and her neck can stretch very long… Both Wasselin and Lijia find it very difficult to dub a school teacher, mainly because she is a woman“ She’s an old woman, so it’s hard for me to imitate her voice. ” “Later, I did a lot of dubbing and focused on the voice of the neck twisting. I hope the players won’t notice that her voice is very masculine…”
Sometimes, when you’re crawling through a vent or walking through a corridor, you hear the enemy’s voice coming from a distance. Depending on where you are, those distant sounds may have different reverberation and ambiguity, making it difficult for you to figure out who the enemy is. In order to deepen the fear of the players, Wasser Berlin also built an audio system at the bottom of the game, which can simulate the way different sounds are made in different places.
Of course, the work of the sound team is not always so boring. In a later stage of Little Nightmares II, urban residents are addicted to watching TV, which plays a kind of Psychedelic 1960s style music. The placement of the song is also random, so players may hear it at different times.
“In the whole project, that part is very interesting because we all feel much more free than when we design other sounds.” “At the time we thought,” thank God, we can design some cheerful music. “