Terraformers:

What Does Life On A New Planet Sound Like?

Overall Skills

Sound Design

The Creation of Sound Assets for all gameplay components such as UI, exploration, city building and more.

Implementation

Handling technical implementation of sounds within Unity C# framework.

To Mars And Beyond!

When the team at Asteroid Lab approached me about making sound for their upcoming game Terraformers, I was beyond excited to get the opportunity to craft a whole new soundscape and sonic identity for their game.

The first step was to figure out exactly what the soundscape should convey and what key textures and elements should be unique to the Terraformers world.

A New Vision

Enacting The Vision

To make Asteroid Lab’s vision come to life, different strategies were used.

  • First of all, recordings of old typewriters, light-switches and a myriad of other objects were used as the basis for all UI sound in the game. This gave the listener a familiar textural element, but processed in a way to seem futuristic

  • All soundscapes were designed from recordings ceiling fans, wind sound from various crevices and so on. This gave a familiar wind movement sound to space, but with a unique twist.

  • Once the base set of sounds were established, we created the remaining sound from the same source material, ensuring a consistent audio identity throughout the game.

Asteroid Lab wanted Terraformers to stand out from the crowd of sci-fi video game competitors, which has been dominated by laser-like sounds. Therefore, we decided to get another direction - tactility.

For us, tactility meant making each button and interaction feel satisfying and real, instead of otherworldly. Tacility also meant making the world feel real, like it was actual human-machinery enacting these changes on a foreign world.

Words From Asteroid Lab

“It has been a blast to work with Frederik on our game Terraformers. He is both talented and very professional, going above and beyond what we expected. Frederik skillfully designed sound effects for both the UI and the game itself as we had agreed, but also proposed new creative ideas to improve many aspects of the project. Every contact we had he was very cheerful and a pleasure to work with”.

Sebastien De Graffenried & Alexis Giard, Founders at Asteroid Lab