ustwo NY
It’s said on TV cooking competitions that if something is simple it had better be delicious. This was, more or less, the design philosophy among the ustwo team. The game was intended for Facebook’s mobile platform, so the goal was to make the core mechanic easy and satisfying to engage with. Sound design-wise, that means spammable, which means that some action at the center of the experience is going to make a lot of sound very often, and that one must test the thing over and over to make sure make sure the sounds are complementary to each other, informative to the player, and not annoying. They don’t teach “not annoying” in sound design school (I did not attend sound design school) but it’s a noble and worthy challenge.
The move, then, was mostly tactile-feeling, Foley-based sounds with just a slight suggestion of tonality, varied across the pool of sounds so that they stack harmoniously on top of each other. To get into some weeds: automation on a stereo imaging plugin and some ring modulation (a kind of mathy frequency manipulation) introduced more variety within the pool.
This took some time to dial in, and the game changed a bunch while we were working on it. It’s so rare to have the time and budget to experiment, but Chris Marotta and ustwo made it a priority.
