Genre : Narrative, Atmospheric,
Psychological horror
Platform : PC
Number of player : 1
Production time : 3 months
Engine : Unreal Engine 4
Nominated at Busan Indie Connect Festival 2022
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Best Audio Design Award at Independant Game Designer Guild Festival
ABEL is a narrative game inspired by the creepy side of the liminal spaces, and puts emphasis on telling its story through empty, stressful, but meaningful places.
Audio Direction
Sound Design
Co-design of the artistic direction with graphist Yann Kukolewsky
Synthesis, foley design, Voice recording of actor Yann Guillemot,
Music Production
Wwise Integration
Composition and production of two musics for the game
Wwise-UE4 integration alongside programmer and tech artist Taslim Guerroumi
The most interesting challenge we had to face with this project was to create soundscapes that would represent the misery and anxiety the character is going through, while telling a story through environments.
I mainly based my work on contrasts building an emotional crescendo, with tricks such as putting music at the beginning of the game for the players to take it for granted, take it away to make them uncomfortable and to put it back better at the end of the game, to ensure a strong emotional conclusion along with the narration.
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The soundscape design was all about giving few, but meaningful sounds to better take them away for the player to feel the lack of sound, presence, and therefore feel uncomfortable.
I focused my design on giving the sounds the most narrative and emotional expression i could, and re-used some of them to make a coherence in the audio direction and create "sound leitmotivs".
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The short amount of time we had and the needs for the project forced me to make compromises. It didn't need special foley or complex audio implementation technique, so I only recorded the minimum I couldn't find, and used foley personal banks for, and made the most simple audio integration I could do (auto play, call events and some rtpc linked with distance) so I could focus on the design and staging of the sounds in the scenes.
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Working with and recording actor Yann Guillemot was a pleasure. He was understanding and efficient, and added a huge plus to the sound and the narrative overall.
With Yann, we co-designed an artistic direction that was fit to tell the terrible story of the protagonist, focusing on the meaning and feeling of each sounds and visuals we'd put in the game. It was an absolute blast to work with this friendly, talented guy !
I had the chance to have a team that was cohesive, attentive, and gave sound a special attention for this project, the work conditions were pretty much perfect, so I couldn't be more proud of what we achieved with this game !