I’ve met Rita Majek and Lauren Descher, the game developers, on the 17th of February on Zoom Call, which Cai Pritchard, the other sound designer, participated in. They’ve sent us a list of documents full of references and ideas for the project beforehand.
The game will be called Virtual Affects – a term fusion with Virtual Reality and Visual effects – and the main idea is to make a VR interactive game where the player has sources and ways to make him calmer, throughout a meditative and fun experience
Rita Majek & Lauren Descher
We aim for the experience to be mindful, relaxing and be a sense of relief for the the user. Specifically for those with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Our experience has three different scenes, three portals that will take you to different environments. We want each environment to leave the user feeling either FREE, ENERGISED OR CALM.
Hence, the game is set in a way of making the illusion of an escapism scenario, where the player can heal and enjoy visual effects and haptic mechanics. For that, they divided the game into 3 scenes: Winter wonderland, Trippy scope, and Zenrapy.
For the different “worlds”, there are different things the player can do: in the Winter Wonderland, it can throw snowballs, in the Trippy Scope it can fly, and in the Zenrapy to draw. Collaterally, the player is invited to go through different exercises in the different worlds: writing down one’s worries, breathing exercises, and stretching. The player would be also accompanied by a penguin.
In terms of sounds needed, it was quite eclectic. Firstly, some environmental sounds (as they were called) were necessary to set the character into different locations: wind and leave sound for the Winter Wonderland, and waterfall sounds for the Zenrappy. In the Trippy Scope, however, there were no ambiences, but only music. Apart from this, it wasn’t demanded anything more important rather than some minor sound effects and voiceovers for the penguin.
In the meeting, it was done task management and it was decided that Cai would do all the sound design for the Winter Wonderland, Elliot for the Zenrapy, and the Trippy Scope. I didn’t take this decision, because of my absence from the first meeting to a calendar mistake. However, I was up for the challenge and I wanted to prove myself I can adapt to different scenarios. I am not a musician, and I don’t understand anything about music theory or how to play an instrument, but I do enjoy doing genre research and getting myself very deep in the process of listening to a specific subgenre.
In the meeting, they showed me their references for the music, and they mostly represented synth-wave and vapourware. It is definitely not the genre I’m interested in, but I consider it to be fun to produce and investigate.