The team at Audient recently spoke with Phil French and Tom Puttick from Cedar Studio to talk about their process in creating the sound effects and music for new game Two Point Hospital. If you have ever wondered what it takes to write music for a game and just how creative you have to be when it comes to making strange machine sounds this video gives you an insight into the process and creativity needed to populate the world of a modern gaming environment.

Sound Effects

Phil and Tom wanted to give this game an entirely original sound so they set about recording and creating every effect from scratch without using any samples. With the help of the game build they were slowly able to piece together the effects to match the machines and environments. The sound for the games ‘Chromatherapy’ machine was the sound of yogurt being blown through some straws hitting and upturned umbrella. Nice!

Music

The brief for the games music was “Think lift music”. Not always want you want to hear as a composer but the bonus here was that the tracks did not need to loop as they do in most games, they could be 3 or 4 minute songs with no vocals in their own right.

After starting with basic guitar or piano tracks the pair added real percussion to keep the life feel to the music.

Ambience

The ambience for the game was recorded in both outside locations and inside real hospitals.
Many of the outside sounds were recorded on a basic handheld field recorder. The beach tones were recorded on a Spanish beach in the middle of the night.

Voiceover

As well as the games live DJ who is playing though the gameplay there is also a tannoy announcer giving you clues and hints in the game and if you zoom into the characters they all speak and mumble too, so there was a tonne of VO to write and record.

User Interface

The team also had to create all the sounds for any interaction with the games UI. These included manipulating a recorded plunger sound which became the sound when a new machine is created.

Implementation

Timing is everything in game play and making sure the correct sound hits at the correct time even when running the game in faster than realtime modes is tricky. Phil and Tom tell us how they cut up many of the smaller audio files to make sure they hit on cue.

The game Two Point Hospital is available now for PS4 and available on the Steam Store.