Behind the Soothing Sound of ‘SEASON: a letter to the future’ – with Spencer Doran, Dylan Escalona, Nikola Viel, and Manuel Silva

The word “apocalypse” tends to conjure up images of brutal lawlessness, but Scavengers Studio‘s exploration game SEASON: a letter to the future is the polar opposite of the Mad Max reality one would typically imagine upon hearing the term. Instead of chaotic, it’s melancholic. The world is mostly devoid of inhabitants, so the sounds of nature prevail. It’s a calm, inviting soundscape with a sonic color palette that is as subdued as the visual one.

The player takes on the role of Estelle, a young woman from a small village set on a mission of recording all she can of the dying world using a camera, her audio recorder, and her scrapbook/journal. The audio recorder is an interesting in-game tool that one rarely experiences as part of gameplay, and getting that to work just right posed some interesting challenges for the sound team, like how to replicate the more precise sonic perspective you get when listening to a sound source going into the mic and playing through headphones.

Here, sound team members Spencer Doran (Audio Director & Composer at Scavengers Studio), Dylan Escalona (Lead Audio at Vibe Avenue), Nikola Viel (Production Manager & Music Designer at Vibe Avenue), and Manuel Silva (Audio Designer at Vibe Avenue) discuss their approach to creating the game’s peaceful palette, how they designed the ambiences and winds, how they created the sound of Estelle’s bicycle, her protective pendant, and, of course, her recorder. They also talk about designing specific sounds, such as the Memory Flowers, the giant prayer bell, and the UI sounds. They talk about their use of Audiokinetic’s middleware Wwise in conjunction with Unreal Engine to perfect the in-game recorder’s focus and aim system, and so much more!

SEASON: A letter to the future – CG Story Trailer

SEASON: A letter to the future is a third-person “atmospheric” adventure/bicycle road trip game. The sounds are mellow and inviting. Can you talk about your approach to finding the “right” sounds? What did you use to guide your choices? Were there general guidelines for aesthetics, or was it more of a feeling?

Spencer Doran (SD): There were guidelines that I drafted up and gave as a presentation to the whole production team early on, explaining the more conceptual background to my approach for the audio direction. As part of the game’s over-arching philosophy, we wanted the player to engage with the in-game world on their own terms and be able to set their own sense of pace, affording space for moments of contemplation to blossom and unfurl along the way — nothing forceful or too overtly goal-oriented. This meant that the audio experience needed an overall sense of calm that didn’t necessarily sit in the foreground, but still was interesting and engaging if you chose to tune into the nuance of it.

…we wanted the player to engage with the in-game world on their own terms and be able to set their own sense of pace…

A big influence came from the field of acoustic ecology, thinking about how an individual interacts specifically with their sonic environment to create notions of meaning (something which becomes quite literal with the recorder in the game) and how the different elements of the audio experience (foley, recordable sounds, score, UI, etc.) needed to have an inter-harmonious nature as if they were one big interlinked composition.

Dylan Escalona, Lead Audio at Vibe Avenue

Dylan Escalona (DE): In SEASON, we could take advantage of the contrast between two audio aesthetics. Most of the sounds, including environment, nature, weather, and foley, are very organic and based on recordings, but others, especially the UI, music or for certain particular contexts, are much more synthetic in nature.

In both cases, the general direction was “soft sounds that do not distract nor attract.” We had the incentive to refrain from using harsh sounds and keep the soundscape as pastel as the visual. There are important exceptions to this, but I’ll describe them further in another section.
 

Being an atmospheric game, the sound of the world (the spatialization and panning of environmental sounds and ambiences) is so important for immersion, to make you feel like you’re discovering and documenting this world. Can you talk about your sound work here from both creative and technical standpoints? What were some of your opportunities or challenges? Can you talk about your ambience system(s)? Foley system(s)?

DE: I’ll let Manuel answer in detail; I’ll just note that if it wasn’t for the recorder feature we would’ve used a completely different approach for ambiences and spatialization in general.

Manuel Silva, Audio Designer at Vibe Avenue

Manuel Silva (MS): One of the biggest challenges was that everything needed to be “record-friendly.” After trying different solutions, we decided to hand-place sounds on pretty much every element of the landscape. Each tree and each bush has its own sound source. There are literally thousands of them! We used the same process to fake the continuity of a river or a cliff, placing sound sources all along its path.

It was an extremely time-consuming process that brought its share of challenges, including phase and optimization issues. On the other hand, it was also the system that gave us the most freedom and customization options. We were able to fine-tune every element, tweaking sound assets, random delays, and attenuation curves to taste to make every location unique and interesting to record.

Being an atmospheric game, we also needed to create space for silence. There are sounds everywhere but we still aimed to have some quiet, contemplative moments. Silence without silence is a hard balance to achieve! Moreover, in this kind of experience, you can’t hide behind loud music and sword impacts, so the ambiances and foley really need to be compelling.
 

Can you talk about designing the West Forest Path that’s full of memory flowers? What went into your design here?

SD: The design for the memory flowers arose out of iterating on the concept with the director Kevin Sullivan along with the narrative designer Jane Tan, design director Sébastien Berton, and game designer Melcom Briy.

Each individual flower needed to feel as if it had a memory locked within it…

Each individual flower needed to feel as if it had a memory locked within it that was only unrecoverable if you recorded it, and this needed to also be scalable to the flower field of hundreds in the West Forest Path. After a few different prototypes, I landed on a system where the audio had three stages of abstraction, revealing or hiding different layers depending on if you were walking, listening, or recording them. In all but the final stage (recording), they needed to be unintelligible (due to the particulars of the closed captioning/subtitle system) but also still sound like each specific memory, so I used a long effects chain of granular synthesis, shifting reverb, and vocoding to “scramble” them.

…and this needed to also be scalable to the flower field of hundreds in the West Forest Path.

I then broke these up into small clips for Dylan to randomize within Wwise so they never appeared to be looping and he made a system for them to shift between the different audio states. Because the FX chain was in-DAW instead of in-engine, all of these clips were pre-baked so we had to do the whole process in triplicate for the different voice-over localizations.

All in all, it ended up being one of the more time-consuming systems in the game!

DE: Remember the important exceptions to the soft-sounding audio experience I mentioned earlier? This is one of them. Unlike most of the soundscape, the memory flowers needed to attract attention. They had to create an uneasy feeling as they are dangerous and can harm you if you are not wearing your mother’s pendant.

The initial idea for the flower’s aesthetic is the brainchild of Spencer. We helped him push his vision even further, making those sounds feel strange and disturbing. It’s a totally voluntary move to have them stand out, synthetic and harsh.

What were some of your favorite locations to design for the game? Why? What went into the sound of these places?

SD: The cow field in Tieng was a big favorite, with the biophony of the cows intermingling with the radio stations drifting through the air and the rustle of the field. Also, Caro plaza, with the local mechanical instruments melding with the abstracted score and winds through the hanging-wish tree, was a beautiful one to work on, too.

Nikola Viel, Production Manager & Music Designer at Vibe Avenue

DE: The plaza of Caro village has a special place in my heart. It’s where we benchmarked the use of the recorder. A lot of time was spent disseminating details and giving life to it. The central tree has a lot of different layers to catch the player’s attention. Caro Village is your first encounter with the recorder, and one of the most recorded places in the game.

Nikola Viel (NV): I really like when you go down to Tieng Valley right after your interaction with the Greyhand. Great musical moment!

MS: Not to piggyback on Nikola’s comment but my favorite spot is the same (for different reasons). The environment in these sections is the perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about silence without silence. It’s also a moment full of melancholy and discovery. The emotional overtones really help the soundscape and scoring to truly become one with the art direction/aesthetic.

What about the weather in the game? How did you create these sounds and manage them in-game? (For instance, there are a lot of different winds!)

MS: Diversity, diversity, diversity. It’s a blend of hand-placed wind and/or rain emitters with different falloff distances tailored to every zone and glued together by the 2D environment. Some areas push the concept a step further. For example, the tunnel outside Caro Village has gusts of wind placed at each of its openings, which gives a nice feeling when cycling through it at full speed.

DE: Since the game is linear, there is no dynamic weather system: every chapter of the game has fixed weather. As Manuel said, to underline this there are a lot of diverse “colors” of wind, rain, and the like. For instance, trees are also emitters of winds and rain. The idea of triggering weather-related sounds on objects came from working on the bus stop keepsake in the rainy environment. It was such a nice touch to hear the modulating raindrops on it (which was Spencer’s idea) that I thought it was worth expanding the idea to trees. We also modulate the wind with your movement speed and the vegetation around you.
 

What went into the sound of the burner and the pendant absorbing the physical and mental attributes of objects in the beginning of the game?

SD: This came from some fairly abstract prompts from Kevin, the director: what is the sound of a memory slipping away into the void? What does a pendant built of lost memories feel like?

As Dylan mentioned, there is little overt synthesis used in the sound design of the game but the supernatural sections are a bit of an exception. I used some FM synthesis and LFO-modulated filter processing (using Suzuki Kentaro’s LFO Cluster M4L device).

…there is little overt synthesis used in the sound design of the game but the supernatural sections are a bit of an exception.

The final sound of the pendant (how you hear it in the rest of the game after it is finished in the scene) is actually made up of a pentatonic drone consisting of five different notes (one for each sense/memory) that loop and shift in intensity to give it a “shimmering” quality. It’s very subtle but if you listen closely during the scene in which you’re building it, you hear them added one at a time and ambiently spatialized while the pendant is “cooking” in various states of completion.

What went into the UI sounds, like the sounds for the Keepsakes Journal, menu navigation sounds, using the camera and recorder, notifications, etc…

SD: UI is actually some of my favorite stuff to work on, and there was a very large library of sounds I made for this project of which we only used a handful. I very much wanted to avoid the very slot-machine-like sensory overload that a lot of contemporary gaming UI design leans on and instead use sounds aligned with Amber Case’s “calm technology” principles (using the periphery of audio perception, having the least amount of auditory information necessary, etc.) in an attempt to retain the reflective/meditative state of the gameplay and not tip it into dopamine-reward-system territory.

I very much wanted to…use sounds aligned with Amber Case’s ‘calm technology’ principles…

I also wanted it to fit into the overall soundworld of the game’s score, so for the non-skeuomorphic sounds, the same family of instruments were used: positif organ, soft-mallet metallic percussion, glass harmonica, etc., and the same scale systems and chords that appear in the score are used in the UI, in particular the recurring strummed minor 9th chord which goes all the way back to the opening piano riff in the game’s first trailer.

…I did my own foley session with a binaural mic using an old ’80s tape player and some books…

By design, the whole musical universe of the game is in the same key, so all of the UI sounds meld with the score and diegetic audio for an overall unified experience.

For the skeuomorphic sounds, like the recorder and the journal, I did my own foley session with a binaural mic using an old ’80s tape player and some books (the same size/dimensions as the in-game journal), giving them a little spatial dimension to sit better in the PS5 Tempest system’s binaural soundfield.

DE: The UI sounds were mostly done by Spencer. For the camera interactions, we spent a lot of time getting it just right. It’s a blend of sounds recorded by Spencer and straightforward sound design with sound banks.

I love that the protagonist Estelle has a recorder to capture sounds – like the sound of water dripping into the ceramic vessel in the Caro Village. (It has this beautiful, melodic sound that reverberates in that stone-walled stairwell space. Lovely!) Can you talk about how you used sound to subtly encourage the player to want to record sounds in-game?

SD: There were a number of technical approaches here. But on perhaps a more basic level, the sounds needed to simply be strange and interesting. Some of them actually came into the concepting as sounds first; when the narrative department was mapping out the inner workings of the story, they asked me to help make a big master list of sounds that could be enticing to have in the environment, which were then triangulated between the art department (to create the assets for the sound source), the level designers (to place them strategically within the environment), and the narrative team (to work them into the lore and storyline of the game).

We wanted to also encourage the player to engage with the environment through close listening…

These had to catch the player’s ear but still sit naturally in the soundscape so they had to exist on a threshold between general foley beds and what acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer called soundmarks — sonic landmarks that denote a specific sense of place which carry a social importance.

We wanted to also encourage the player to engage with the environment through close listening as well, so there are some sounds that are more deeply hidden or embedded within the environment that result in especially important realizations for Estell (if you find them).

DE: The vase you mention is a collectible. Collectible is the internal name given to sounds we want the player to record and document in order to progress in the game. Most of them have two different states: one before and one after recording.

By design, collectibles are more ‘high profile’ than the rest of the soundscape to attract attention…

Before you record them, collectibles are louder and play more frequently. They also sidechain the rest of the environmental sounds. By design, collectibles are more “high profile” than the rest of the soundscape to attract attention, but after the recording we wanted them to blend with the rest of the ambiences. For example, the crickets emit sound constantly when you initially find them, but then only once in a while after having been documented with the tape recorder.

Another way we guide the player towards collectibles is through haptic feedback. Whenever you hold the recorder in your hand, important sounds cause the controller to vibrate. The closer you are, the more intense the vibration. The effect is particularly noticeable with the PS5 controller, where the vibration indicates not only the distance but also the direction of the sound.

NV: Furthermore, the recorder gave us another challenge. Anyone who has practiced field recording knows how much the sonic perspective changes when listening to the sound of your microphone through headphones. Suddenly, your hearing is completely different; it’s much more precise and “surgical.”

To recreate this shift in perception, the whole soundscape has three different states:

• Normal
• When you have the recorder in hand
• When you are recording

Each of those states changes how the sound feels. With the recorder in hand, the music and the 2D part of the ambience fade out, leaving more space for the 3D elements. Sound sources to the sides and rear are muffled, as in typical cardioid microphone fashion. We also add a touch of compression, EQ, and distortion to recreate the feeling of a vintage tape recorder. When recording, the mix is even more focused on the main source, in order to obtain the cleanest possible audio log.

Spencer Doran’s recording trip to Soapstone

Did you go on any field recording trips for the game? Or capture any bespoke sounds? Where did you go? What did you record? How did you record it?

SD: As far as locational recordings went, my pre-production period for the game was during the early days of COVID lockdown/isolation. I came onto the project in May of 2020 so there wasn’t quite as much of that as I would have liked, but I was able to do a few outdoor sessions here in the Pacific Northwest throughout the course of the project. A number of the ambisonic water recordings (that we re-worked for stereo placement in the forest river systems) and forest ambience, I captured in Western Oregon while staying in the Soapstone residence (an amazing structure designed by Portland architect Willard Martin based on the Fibonacci sequence build aside a woodland creek).

I also did some ultrasonic insect recordings in Sea Ranch, California, which are actually the first things you hear on the PS5 profile page for the game.

I used Dodotronic’s Ultramic 384K BLE mic setup, which is optimized for wildlife recordings far outside of the human hearing range. I used the same mic setup for a bunch of general sound design experimentation, as you can do extreme pitch reduction without losing fidelity when you record all the way up to 384kHz.

But overall, we had a typical hybrid approach, collaging bespoke recordings, libraries, and stuff made with synthesis. The Ultramic was also used to make one master bank of bell sounds from one single, aged brass bell that I have in my collection of instruments. Recording in 384K allowed me to pitch it into any tonal range without losing quality, so I was able to use one session to make a whole pentatonic family of bells that are heard on the different cows in the cow field (pitched to match the game’s tonal system), as well as the giant prayer bell that you can ring near the graveyard.

Can you talk about the sound of Estelle’s bicycle? What went into these sounds? And did you create a system to handle the bicycle sounds?

DE: The audio assets are a mix of recorded sounds (we kept several bikes in Vibe Avenue’s basement for a long time…) and sound libraries. But it’s the interactive systems that bring the experience to life.

The most interesting aspect of the bike ride audio experience is probably how it interacts with the wind.

The most interesting aspect of the bike ride audio experience is probably how it interacts with the wind. The speed of the bike influences its volume, pitch, and other parameters. This heightens the sense of speed and highlights the wind without the need to hear it constantly.

We have paid particular attention to the different surfaces. There is a specific sound triggered by the actual surface change: think of the feeling when you go from pavement to grass or vice versa. Here again, haptic feedback enhances the experience, especially on PS5. The first pedal strokes are felt intensely via the controller and, once cruising speed is reached, the vibration is all the stronger as the surface is rough.
 

What were your biggest technical challenges in terms of sound on SEASON? What were your solutions to handling them?

NV: The recorder was probably the biggest challenge. It’s a very uncommon feature. We had to write custom code in collaboration with the programming team at Scavengers Studios to develop the tech needed to make it work. What you playback is truly the exact sound you recorded in-game. It is not fake! The mere presence of this mechanic has dictated how many of the game’s sound systems were approached.

What you playback is truly the exact sound you recorded in-game. It is not fake!

DE: The feeling of the recorder was tricky to get right — from the tape effect when Estelle is wearing her headphones to the clean sound you get while actually recording to the spread of what the microphone is actually picking up (focus and aim system). The point is to mostly hear what is in front of you and ignore the rest. If you get the chance to test the game in 5.1 or in PS5 Spatial audio, you’ll get the effect in its purest form.

SEASON was created using Unreal Engine. Was this a good fit for the sound team? Why or why not?

NV: Unreal is overall a very solid game engine. We did use Audiokinetic Wwise as an audio middleware, I don’t think we would have had the same results without it, as the whole aiming system or the recorder relies heavily on some of Wwise’s built-in tools.

DE: Unreal is the ecosystem I’m the most comfortable with. It gives a lot of freedom and leeway to sound designers. We took advantage of its ability to place sound sources very precisely in the maps, which allowed us to realize our creative vision of sound environments.

What were your biggest creative challenges for this game? Were there locations or specific sounds that required many different iterations? Can you talk about your process of discovery (of getting to the sound that worked best)?

NV: When we started on the project, Spencer had already made a first pass on a lot of features so we already had a framework. That said, some aspects of the soundscape went through a lot of iteration and experimentation. The music system, for example, took many forms over time, ranging from 3D spheres placed directly in Unreal to a complex set of layers controlled by state changes. Ultimately, we didn’t find a perfect solution for the whole game, and the system had to be tailored to the specific needs of each individual location.

DE: I’d say Caro village again, as this was our proof of concept for the recorder. We worked on the collectibles a lot there. All the main features of the soundscape were developed and experimented on in this area.

The second one would be Tieng Valley for its sheer size and the need to be cohesive while still giving each specific subzone a distinct audio personality. Since the level design is more open and less linear, it needed a different kind of attention.
 

How did SEASON help you to grow at your craft? Or, what did you learn while working on this game that’s made you think about new ways of using sound in games?

DE: The aiming system (focus) of the recorder opened my ears to this aspect of the sound. It’s a feature that I now take greater care to set up in my other projects since I spent so much time working on it in SEASON.

MS: Limitations and attenuations. It sounds obvious, but you cannot understate the importance of those aspects in such a game. We also needed to be very careful about phasing or artifacts. We were not trying to have the loudest and most intense mix; it was all about subtlety.

We were not trying to have the loudest and most intense mix; it was all about subtlety.

SD: Though I had a bunch of extremely relevant experience in other tangential fields, SEASON was actually my first time audio-directing a game. My perspective was very much of an outsider from the industry, which was a big part of why I was first brought onto the project. So the entire thing was a really fascinating experience for me, which I think allowed me to apply some outlooks and approaches that are perhaps unique to the field (or at least articulated in a very different way).

NV: From my side, the ideas and the passion for these ideas that Spencer demonstrated in relation to the music system were refreshing and helped me grow as a music designer. When you’ve been using Wwise for many years in many different setups, you get a sense of how the music should be implemented and what kind of systems work. Spencer, for his part, knew exactly what he wanted and the challenge was to find ways to execute his vision within the constraints of the middleware, which I think turned out great in the end.

A big thanks to Spencer Doran, Dylan Escalona, Nikola Viel, and Manuel Silva for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of SEASON: a letter to the future and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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