For my Game Sound Redesign, I decided to reformat the game’s sound by incorporating one of the developer’s biggest influences for this game: DOOM. First and foremost, I went about incorporating one of my favorite tracks from Mick Gordon’s soundtrack for DOOM 2016, BFG Division, into Devil Daggers to make the song match the experience. My intention was to use the intense, visceral sounds from BFG Division to heighten the experience when playing Devil Daggers. Sorath, the developers responsible for Devil Daggers, created an incredible sound design to accompany their game, and my main goal for this project was simply to do the game justice; during the games development, Sorath described their game’s aesthetic guide as a “90s fever dream”, and it’s clear that they more than accomplished that goal with Devil Daggers. Sorath’s sound design is dark and ominous, which fits the game’s visual aesthetic to a tee. The sound design does a perfect job of instilling a sense of dread, making the player consistently feel like they are always only seconds from death. For my sound design, rather than making the player feel a sense of dread as a result of the sound, I wanted to make the player feel powerful and capable in this world. The feeling of ever-present, looming death is still an important aspect of the game, but with the incorporation of DOOM-inspired sound design, the same sense of badass-ery that id Software programed into each frame of DOOM is now in the harsh world of Devil Daggers.
The sound effects were an entirely different story, each of which was custom made for this project. The dagger-shotgun sound was created by modulating the sound of a regular shotgun with a low frequency oscillator, and a similar effect was applied to the dagger-machinegun sound. To give character to the demonic creatures who inhabit the game, I took recordings of insects walking around and modulated their sound to make the sound deeper and more imposing. The death sound was a pitch-shifted recording of a human groan, and its main purpose was to signify the death of the player character, but also to allude back to DOOM, once again.
