Music and sound effects
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Music and sound effects are a big part of Somnium, that is really important to convey our aesthetic goal to the audience. For example, in order to create the specific music and ambient sound, we have had the great opportunity to be in contact with a student from the nearby “Tonsättarskolan” and had him develop the ambient sound and music for us. This way the music is tailored for the game, and the events of occurring in our game. Since we have a nightmare, and a good dream, we needed to make all aspects of the dream feel good in the good dream, and vice verse. This means that we have a title music track for our menu and for the good dream, which is soft, gentle, and dreamy. The music for the nightmare, is more towards a spooky ambient sound, with weird sounding instruments and such. To add to this, there is also backward whispers, and a very deep bass or rumbling sound, that adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game. Now when the dream switches from bad to good, everything that is even remotely bad, fades out, and the only thing left is this peaceful title music. Our intention is to make the player aim towards being in the normal dream for as long as possible, before the darkness creeps up again. To steer all of this, I made a Sound Manager, which controls every sound that needs some form of interaction. I’m not very proud of the code it self, since most of it is basically hard coded, but sometimes that’s just faster than changing the whole sound management system. The code for the sound manager can be found here, and maybe it will prove to be useful to someone in the future, altough I doubt it.  |