#sluibaposting

[sluiba]

FI->EN Song & Translation: Vilma Jää - Manalan Mailla

That which the wind brought from the underworld I fend off like a storm Frost approaching hell The underworld freezing over

Full English lyrics & translator’s notes on Lyrics Translate.

[sluiba]

remedy plays fbc firebreak (endless shift): trivia and funfacts (2026/01/23)

featuring mike kayatta (game director), simon rozner (principal gameplay designer), julius fondem (community manager), as well as off-screen players miika huttunen (senior communications manager), francisco da silva (junior qa tester)

FYI, fbc: firebreak is free to play on steam this very weekend! so literally right now!!!

kayatta is "a gigantic fan" of the "criminally underrated" mass effect 3 multiplayer mode (god!! same!!!!), and that was a purposeful design influence for firebreak from the start

(kayatta says he brought up the game up in an early presentation and was quietly told "you can't mention mass effect 3 multiplayer" so now he goes out of his way to champion this cause. based tbqh)

rozner also mentioned taking inspiration from left for dead and rotato, in the sense that these games are accommodating for even casual players who only have maybe as little as 15-20mins to play

the devs did not want to rebuild the game from scratch with endless shift, but use what was already there, which posed its own challenges

balancing was also apparently pretty difficult, considering the whole rng nature of roguelites. kayatta described two opposing schools of balancing: the "feel" balancers, who play a lot and get hands-on experience, and the "paper" or "excel" balancers, who approach balance as a math problem. he seems to feel neither of these schools alone get the desired results

getting to break the game with a crazy op build is purposeful, but shouldn't happen too often, or it stops being exciting

some powerups might seem useless or solely harmful, but can be extremely powerful in combination with specific other ones

on feedback: the devs take it seriously and have a space for it on discord, even if they dont directly respond to most of it. in fact kayatta says they need the feedback, being a smaller team. rozner further remarks that balancing is never truly done but an ongoing process

in an earlier version of the game, you could shoot into the ground with a shotgun and use the recoil to go off "into outer space" 🚀

rozner holds the record on the dev team for most waves survived in endless shift. he says he got to wave 46 or 47 playing duo with a remedy tech programmer named adam. it took them an hour and a half 😭

someone in chat was throwing shade at julius for wasting the powerups while he was playing and when it was brought up to him he was like "yeah i saw it and i smiled"

did you know? if you leave a bunch of little clumps of corruption on the ground for a bit, they will begin to attract one another and fuse into bigger clumps, which are worth more money than the original little clumps combined, so theres a bit of a risk/reward calculation of how long you can leave a clump but still catch it before it despawns at the end of a wave. in any case, piling up corpses in one place is beneficial

there is an easter egg in the game that, to kayatta's knowledge at least, no one has ever found! here's his very vague hint: "you have to reach a certain place, and it's there."

in addition to being the game director, kayatta is actually also the writer for the game! so he's the source of all the dialogue as well as the characters. he says he came up with most of it "while having dinner with my poor wife".

the voice actors of hank and jerry liked playing off of each other so much that when the devs added more of their voice lines into the game, they went out of their way to get them to meet and work in the same studio at the same time : ) which kayatta says was a big learning from this game

joshua wichard, whomst voices jerry and also the puppets, made an appearance in chat! when asked what jerry's coffee order is, wichard said jerry strikes him as a cappuccino guy. apparently he also streams the game sometimes? it wasn't mentioned which platform, but probs either twitch.tv/joshwichard or www.youtube.com/@JoshWichard

kayatta says the firebreak team acknowledge that there have been some problems with the game; according to him, their small team got so excited about the game and actually making and implementing it that they got tunnel visioned and neglected some details, such as clarity. his suggested fix for this going forward was to prototype small pieces of the game early. rozner added that endless shift had a very short prototyping phase, and while it was daunting to be putting in so much content so fast, that made them focus very quickly, and it kept things fresh; and if something didn't work, they just took it out and focused on what was already fun instead of spending months trying to make it work

remedy is aware of what theyre good at and known for, and do want to stick to that, but also wish to learn from other genres and want to try other things as well. and what theyve learned from making firebreak is that "live service, as a space, is just… brutally difficult", because of various expectations existing outside the game itself: "i can only fit so many of these games into my schedule?", "can i bring my friends along with me? can i convince…"

the goal with firebreak was never "how do we build a perfect live service game?", but "how do we build a really fun game that we on the dev team like to play?"

[sluiba]

remedy plays control pt 9/9: trivia and funfacts (2025/11/13)

featuring clay murphy (principal writer), vida starčević (senior community manager), julius fondem (community manager & publishing coordinator)

the control dev streams are finished now!

aw2 dev streams will not start until next year!!!

clay murphy thinks cigarette smoke is a comforting smell?? hello???? we're off to a great start

on writing for control

murphy wrote a lot of the side content, side characters (so not jesse and dylan) and little documents you can find in control. he also wrote the lake house dlc for aw2 and two of the three night springs episodes (number one fan + north star). the kojima side quest was the first thing he wrote at remedy (with together kojima's translator, aki saito). but NOT any ahti stuff, cos you need to be a native finnish speaker to get the idioms right (he was written by sam lake & sinikka annala)

there was no set story for the foundation dlc that murphy needed to work around, so he was basically given free rein. the themes he went for with the dlc were authority and friction; jesse spends a lot of the main game criticizing trench and thinking She Would Never, so the dlc is about how easy it is to fuck up in this world with that much responsibility, even when acting out of good intentions

re: working with sam lake - he's apparently super easy to work with and receptive to pitches. for a lot of games you're not gonna get to write whatever you want, but control was the exception; sam lake's feedback was usually just to ask to make the thing even weirder. the one note he gave on the foundation dlc was to rename the nail, because the original ("the spike") wasn't "on brand"

murphy's favorite part of working on control was langston: "he's there for the dental plan"

vida suggested listening to the brian hennerman tapes and murphy went "i'd rather cut my own tongue out" 😭 apparently the actor who was originally meant to voice brian did "too good of a job" and sounded "way too hot", not young and awkward enough, and murphy figured they needed an amateur to get it right, so he might as well do it himself. and he did

the dlc team had a bet sheet re: how long it would take after release to find all the cats. some people were betting on a year. it took something like 3-ish hours

whenever fra uses a name, it's always the name of someone who came back from the apollo mission, because "his understanding is limited to that circumstance"; when he says "roosa" in "roosa, you ping-pong!", he's trying to say "jesse" but he doesn't have the language for that. fra's voice actor was told what each line means so he'd know how to deliver it, and apparently the actor thought it was "therapeutic"? not elaborated on. ok

the toilet you can find in one of the dlcs is the same one mentioned in Shifted Bathroom Complaint in the main game

on the fish language: "i know what it says..."; murphy didn't invent a whole conlang for that one note, but says he knows what most of the words mean. jebini-rog means thank you :)

on the platforming side mission with the camera - they wanted something with an 80s, outrun-esque aesthetic. since the camera produces a film in-universe, murphy wanted for the player to be able to find the film (footage of the player actually completing the mission) later in the game, but there was no way to execute that 😔

on writing more generally

there's no one path into writing for games. for murphy it was writing degree -> facebook game jobs -> eventually bigger jobs... many games writers are freelancers and start off working on games that make no money no splash no nothin

having seen and read works that inspired control (southern reach trilogy, twin peaks) helped him in his job interview at remedy. but he points out you also wanna read a wide range so you know how to adapt to various tones

it's easy to recognize bad writing and a bad story, but hard to vocalize why, and hard to be objective about your own writing. you learn to recognize these things when you read and watch enough good and bad stories

"you have to listen to your characters", follow their interpersonal dynamic even when it takes you somewhere you didn't expect. when working in teams, smaller writing teams (as opposed to big ones) help with maintaining cohesion and having characters stay in-character

"actors elevate writing"; writers do get to influence delivery, though mostly that's a voice director's job

worst writing advice he's gotten (presumably paraphrased): "writing takes a piece out of you and you can never get it back and then you put a shotgun in your mouth. (…) hemingway wasn't a great writer because he was messed up! (…) you can have a life, you can have a family, you can write!"

murphy's treatment for writer's block is to go see a movie.

quotes from the stream:

chat q: "is it hard to balance the bureaucratic government organization stuff with the wacky stuff?" murphy: "no..."

murphy on the remedy slack: "should i come up with a coffee language?" everyone else at remedy: "YES"

murphy: "whos dan and phil?" vida: "...............dont worry about it"

vida: "sauron?" julius: "no, post malone"

vida: "it's a booze quote??" julius: "no, buddhist"

murphy on tiktok: "it's like vaulting through broken glass"

murphy on uwu speech: "it's like taking a cheese grater to my face"

murphy on himself: "old man yells at cloud"

murphy on martin scorsese: "i think if you have children you shouldn't pick which ones you want to parent. (…) it's not slander, it's just bare facts. i mean, huge respect to his films, BUT: parent your kids."

(deranged brian hennerman / alex casey theorycrafting momence)

other:

one of the trials games (They Are About Dirtbike Platforming) apparently has an insane puzzle/arg that involves finding boxes in the real world and waiting 100 years to get together to open them??? finnish game devs NOT beating the sick in the head allegations

automod restricted the chat message "lesbians can famously ping each other psionically over great distances" because of the word "famously". went through when re-sent with "f*mously". ok

[sluiba]

remedy plays control pt 2: trivia and funfacts (2025/09/04)

featuring teemu huhtiniemi (principal level designer), victor sermin (build engineer), julius fondem (community manager & publishing coordinator)

control console update featuring the kojima cameo side quest will be coming out within the week (which at the time of posting this would be a single day)

fyi the threshold kids vhs tapes from iam8bit are in NTSC format

huhtiniemi specifically worked on central executive.

for remedy's 30th birthday, they have a small museum set up at their offices. they have sam lake's and ilkka villi's teeth molds there. normal workplace

the pneumatic tube system is meant to be like the veins of the oldest house

why weren't the notes in control given an audio track? "probably a lack of time" says julius

the elevators are non-euclidian; if you look at the map while inside a moving elevator, you'll see the elevator is moving sideways

julius has never played awan 🫣

one of the firebreak gameplay designers bought a huge bag of small rubber ducks :)

never launch anything on a friday! and ideally not on a thursday either. sermin and another dev had to go back to work at 10pm on a friday night and work at the offices till 4am to get a fix out before the weekend for control ultimate edition 🫡

the finnish word for level also means surface. so sometimes when huhtiniemi tells people in finnish he works as a level designer, people think he designs desks or tables 😭

finnish architect alvar aalto was one of huhtiniemi's inspirations when designing central executive; the vyborg library heavily influenced the design of dead letters. furthermore, various brutalistm heavy districts in the capital city, such as malmi, itäkeskus, and pasila, provided reference material for the oldest house in places such as the lobby area

the brutalist architecture setting made the level designers' job easier because they didn't have to worry about the environment stuff as much

these ppl keep saying "still holds up" about control a game thats only 6 years old 🫢

"will there be a full finnish stream" "no"

at remedy's 30-year celebration party someone apparently did the math for their 30 year coffee budget???

working at remedy turned sermin from an occasional into a regular coffee drinker

"surprisingly when you study physics at university you don't throw forklifts"

sermin worked originally at remedy in managing, julius was formerly a producer. remedy's apparently p flexible

joonas kruus designed all of maintenance

as a kid, sermin used to go to a video game store and ask if they had games with ragdoll physics. he knows what hes about

the big map of the us with the little alarm lights has a typo. columbus, the capital of ohio is misspelled as "colombus"

remedy has "super nice" 3d printers. to what end? shrug emoji

the names plaque in logistics, like the one in suomi hall in alan wake 2, uses random combinations of devs' first & last names

[sluiba]

can we fucking talk about sam the photonic autism allegory from starfleet academy? and how she spends most of s1 lamenting how the organic allistic allegories around her perceive her as being Too Much? and how, although her organic friends keep telling her shes fine the way she is, the writers of the show clearly do not agree with the sentiment in the slightest?

sam starts dying. why? she's too "emotionally immature" to survive psychological hardship. the allo-allos figure they can resurrect her by turning her into an infant and giving her a childhood to build "resilience". this basically involves rewriting her entire past and who she is as a person without her consent. and now she's alive again, and Significantly Less, and openly laments having ever been who she used to be.

even if they eventually have her arc lead back to acceptance of who she used to be, what are they fucking Saying here with all this? what am i, as an autistic viewer, supposed to take away from a character dying of being too autistic? im getting strong whiffs of infantilization, autism speaks rhetoric, and refrigerator mother theory. by starfleet academy's logic, an autistic person would be better off "cured", even if the only related problem is allistic prejudice. i shudder to think what these writers make of julian bashir's backstory, because ds9 rightfully framed what was done to him as a tragedy, but sam's arc frames a very similar situation as a triumph. how repulsive is that?

[sluiba]

remedy plays control pt 6: trivia and funfacts (2025/10/16)

featuring juha vainio (executive producer), brooke maggs (principal narrative designer), julius fondem (community manager & publishing coordinator)

control ultimate edition console update is OUT NOW !

alan wake design works book preorders CLOSE TOMORROW ! it might not become available ever again !!

if you want a reprint of the control art book, go to this site and click "email me when interested"; they will use it to gauge interest

remedy's humble bundle featuring all of remedy's games (minus fbc firebreak, for which you get a discount code) closes TOMORROW ! its an insane deal! profits go to save the children!

vainio was the lead producer, responsible for, among other things, "keeping [the devs] happy"

maggs was a narrative designer; control was the first game she worked on

everyone on stream loves the asynchronous suit

it was a challenge finding places to put narrative items because the destructive environments meant they could get lost if poorly placed

the oldest house is infinite and can produce rooms as needed.

different sectors are meant to be color coded; research is yellow

narrative had a spreadsheet that covered all the topics they wanted the player to know about and sprinkled narrative items not covered by the main story along the player's way

the anchor boss fight was designed by adam persson; he works at housemarque nowadays

vainio, as the guy who had to make sure the game stayed within budget and schedule, had an excel sheet that listed all of the game's intended features. two thirds were cut out of the final game

concepts need development names before narrative comes up with the final name. hiss was not meant to be the final name but the development name was accidentally name dropped at a presentation and it stuck

underhill is one of maggs' favorite characters

maggs suggested the plants sidequest to clay murphy : ) murphy was a bit puzzled as to what jesse would say to the plants

re: learning the tone of the game and remedy - they spent time talking about the genre of new weird; "things have a grounding in reality, but theres an extreme or a strangeness that goes along with it" - things like the juxtaposition of the brutalist architecture with the trees, or talking to plants... inspirations included annihilation, david lynch / twin peaks, but final cohesion is a challenge

"we don't explain anything if we can help it" - going overboard with an idea and over-explaining is a temptation, but usually that takes away from the weird, so it's best to lean back. but you should allow room your characters to be curious about and stressed by the weirdness in the world

on working for remedy - maggs points out that "one of the good things about remedy is good ideas can come from anywhere", and "individuals get to have an impact"; julius points out variety as one of the things he enjoys at remedy

maggs' favorite thing to work on was oceanview; got to work in groups with ppl from lots of different disciplines; "one of my favorite things is the people, and the attention to detail (...) people really want to understand more about the narrative, and more about the world, and contribute (...) you could walk to people's computers and see what they were working on"

maggs got asked by an environmental artist what to put on trench's desk. bet a lotta ppl dont think about how it was someones job to come up with that

vainio: "games are fun but games development often isnt fun (...) my job is to make sure people are having fun, which results in games being even more fun"

julius points out that grouping devs by discipline rather than task can be ineffective; according to vainio, they changed to this approach after pre-production

maggs described an action of jesse turning a panting the right way up and an animator got nervous because "we dont have that animation" and making a custom animation for that one specific thing is very expensive, so jesse just turns them around magically lmao

pneumatic tubes were put in as a narrative reason for how people communicate in a mostly technology-free environment

maggs joined control halfway through the production

the overlay effects are called "blended videos" internally

"we definitely pay attention to what we put on the whiteboards"

julius was familiar with control, alan wake 1, max payne; maggs was v familiar with max payne 1-2, a little bit with alan wake 1 and quantum break

for maggs, the hardest things about working on the game were figuring if they were "going too far, or not far enough, with the weirdness"; trying to ride the line between horror and comedy as well as safeguarding the tone across the game; and keeping a spreadsheet to inform other teams wrt what info the player is and isnt supposed to have at any given point in the game, given control's metroidvania elements

julius comments on the difficulties and trial and error involved with finding the tone of a game

"(ahti) doesn't feel like he needs to explain himself."

most of the people working at fbc are not "people persons": underhill doesn't like you, langston is awkward, ahti mostly keeps to himself, marshall mostly just cares about whether you're competent, etc

brian hennerman was voiced by clay murphy

the gun is NOT sentient. but it does choose who it obeys

it was clay murphy who wanted the game to have an in-world explanation for how the power cores work (which was introduced in the foundation dlc)

next stream will be same time next week!

[sluiba]

remedy plays control pt 8: trivia and funfacts (2025/10/30)

featuring daniel kończyk (senior vfx artist), vida starčević (senior community manager), julius fondem (community manager & publishing coordinator)

vida's favorite parts of every project are "bothering people" - asking people to show what they're working on, seeing how games are made, and how many disciplines are required - and getting to see people's reactions upon launch and see the player community "grow and change and form"

vida's favorite part of control was being on set for filming the dr darling live action stuff; they had only a few days to film all of it, and the last day of filming was just takes upon takes of dynamite

assist mode was added due to player feedback

photo modes are not a light feature to develop, but control in particular lends itself to virtual photography so well that it has increased the longevity of the game

originally the office portion of the game at the end of control was intended to have very simplified mobile game like graphics and gameplay, similar to what was done later in the time breaker episode of night springs in alan wake 2

the bottle on trench's desk is very obviously a nationally famous finnish brand of cut brandy: jaloviina (lit. "noble liquor"). this one star variant of jaloviina has been nicknamed "the sheriff", whomst also have a single star on their badges, so in-game the brand is called "noble sheriff". the label on the bottle asserts that "there can only be one sheriff in town", which... isn't a true statement... but it is true that there can only be one director in the oldest house...

courtney hope apparently super enjoyed working on control ☺️

kończyk described himself as a "regular scrub" doing "all the motion sickness inducing stuff, all the things that people hate and turn off at the beginning. motion blur, all of those. we love to use that."

kończyk also said he's working on "........the next installment". mayhaps it won't just be called control 2?

environmental destruction was really important to the game to create a contrast of neat office environments and complete destruction. why? "it's fun." but also, thematically appropriate: being in control of the environmental dressing, witnessing the cause and effect of your action

performance-wise, computers were not a problem, the consoles (xbox one, ps4) were. to work around this, they implemented a hard limit for object pieces; past that limit, object pieces will simply break into particles and disappear. but unbreakable objects will not disappear and can still cause performance problems

the hardest vfx thing to figure out was the hiss fluid; it's a 2.5-dimensional real time fluid simulation, which is usually very performance-intensive so doesn't tend to get used, but "janne [pulkkinen], our art director... if he wants a very specific expensive effect to happen, then it happens. (...) i remember really kind of admiring that call (...) so the focus was, art direction is king. we focus on making all the special stuff that makes the game unique. takes the prime over everything else."

in university, kończyk's first ever project he was making with friends was "kind of trying to be alan wake"; as students trying to make a triple-A game, they "failed miserably", but this put him on remedy's radar. during his job interview, he saw glimpses of control and thought, "i haven't seen this before. i need to know how it's done. i need to be part of this."

vida said she also saw stuff about control during her job interview and thought, "wow, i've not seen a game like this ever. i have to work here!"

on creating the hiss and polaris effects practically: "oh yes. if you want, you can, i guess, rent a lab, do some chemical reaction stuff, record it with a, i don't know, a 10,000 dollar camera and then edit the footage, each 20 second video having, like, 200 gigabytes. really fun to work with. you just wait forever until it loads, then wait forever until it renders..." 🥲

the "bloody vignette" effect when you get damaged is not blood! that's the hiss effect, it's trying to invade you

kończyk also worked on aw2, and says he used soy sauce to create the blood effects you get on the screen: "i initially started with ketchup (...) i don't know why i fixated on food."

kończyk's favorite thing to work on in control were "just regular typical explosions", and he likes to watch slo-mo videos of explosions; "we even had a crew outing with the team where we went to explode some stuff, blow up some dynamite, shoot some cannon balls..." <- THE DREAM

the big red boxes with flammable gas in them are seismographs! julius: "what does a seismograph do?" kończyk: "the first question should be why a seismograph has a gas bottle."

you can't carry items out of a streaming zone (think loaded chunk of the game) because you could create infinite copies of items this way and that would kill performance

there's a speedrun strat in control the community dubbed "slidy mcgunny" where jesse disappears and you only play as the gun, enabling you to access places you normally couldn't

vida asked kończyk whether the astral plane needed much vfx and he said "no, there's barely anything. it's just cubes flying in the void. that's the smart creativity that we pride ourselves at remedy" 😭😭😭

kończyk on the astral plane challenges: "i never necessarily knew how it works. like, you put a golden cube into a golden place, and... it... astral plane does what?"

remedy does have a general vfx library that can be used across projects, and there is an asset called "remedy smoke" that, according to kończyk, "does not want to die. it is immortal." it's been there possibly since alan wake 1, "and now it is in every project and reused in almost every single effect"

the difference between senior and principal means different things at different studios, but at remedy it reflects experience and responsibility level

kończyk gets headaches from the color red, and as he points out, in control "the color red is the main antagonist", so it involved "a bit of sacrifice" 🫡 thank you king

fire vfx can be a challenge when it's brought up real close to the camera or viewed from every possible angle

"we had those issues in alan wake where you could destroy something, a plank would fall and block the door and you cannot jump in the game. youre done. it happens all the time."

love vida spotting another seismograph (to demonstrate an explosion effect) and going, "i see her..!!"

[sluiba]

remedy plays control pt 7: trivia and funfacts (2025/10/23)

featuring ville sorsa (principal audio designer), julius fondem (community manager & publishing coordinator)

fyi, if you are into audio or music creation yourself, you should definitely watch this stream in its entirety yourself! sorsa goes into a lot more detail than i have recapped here, but this post would be INSANELY long if i put it all here. i had to segment and rerder this a lot for coherence to begin with

about ville sorsa

sorsa was in the music industry in his 20s and early 30s, then moved on to tv and movies, and has now been at remedy for almost 15 years. when he started, remedy still used fax machines and made ring tones 🫢

sorsa worked on "the overall audio identity" of control, which was exciting for him, since getting to shape the audio identity of a new ip is a rare opportunity in the triple A space. he also worked on the foundation dlc, but not awe

ville sorsa also worked on alan wake's american nightmare, quantum break, aw2, and fbc firebreak (though in that last one's case he came in very late in the project and mostly helped with mixing and polishing as well as some of the guns)

sorsa personally likes electropunk and drum & bass, and listed prodigy, pendulum, richard devine, and "loads of metal bands" as his favorites

sorsa's favorite movies include antichrist, enter the void, and possessors; "if you're a remedy fan, you need to watch them". annihilation was also mentioned as a big inspiration for the audio design in control

sorsa loves playing firebreak!

about control

control was a "turning point" for remedy in a lot of ways (not specified how but it's not that hard to extrapolate...)

the game has a special place in sorsa's heart due to the quirky nature of the game as well as the more exploratory nature of the game compared to remedys other, more linear titles

for every project, sorsa sets a theme. originally, control was originally meant to be more "voice-based", as in, a lot of the aesthetic was meant to be produced by human mouths. in the end, the theme for control ended up being heavy use of modular synthesizers

there was a conscious pursuit of trying to obscure the line between music and sound design in this game

specific locations around the oldest house had different flavored "environment kits"; for instance, the mold's kit is "organic, animalistic" while the hiss is "horror-esque, corrupted". in contrast, polaris is "harmonic and soothing". the fbc uses a lot of old tech, so they used a lot of soviet era, lo-fi, crunchy synth sounds

big innovations for control included generative (dynamic, reactive) music, and the ashtray maze, the latter of which took almost a year to do due to the sheer amount of complexity, working with poets of the fall, and fine tuning deets… but ☝️ learning these things for control streamlined the process for aw2

the service weapon was originally very different in terms of aesthetic. sorsa was initially asked to make the service weapon sound "futuristic" and "like blade runner 2049"; the rev-up sound is a remnant from that design iteration

biggest challenges were finding complementing aesthetics, as well as atmosphere and mood. not everything has to be recorded from scratch, there is an audio library they can use for more generic stuff, but its best to record anything that stands out to create an identity

sorsa showed off a bunch of different gear throughout the stream, including a mic with a "dead cat" (wind muff), a whole bunch of different modular synths, his little on the go bag for outdoors audio recording equipment, an aztec death whistle (VOLUME WARNING), a "horse cock" (also used by mick gordon in doom apparently) (dont @ me about the name), and whatever the fuck this is by azzam bells (maybe the mpa019?)

references were also made to "marvin" and "the apprehension engine", which were discussed and shown off in a little more detail by petri alanko and richard lapington on the first aw2 dev stream

some of the hiss sounds are sorsa's own voice 😱

the board's sound effect was one of the last aesthetics they figured out. sorsa's vision was a "very low, demanding, god-like sound", similar to the world serpent from god of war (2018), so the idea was to pitch down someone's voice, much like the godzilla movies. but sorsa was busy towards the end of dev and didn't have time to figure it out. meanwhile sam (someone from the audio team i think) had envisioned it to sound like a radio transmission from another dimension. in the end it fell to petri alanko to do the board sounds. it's his voice btw

the threshold kids theme song was sung by petri alanko as well. he's just doing a baby voice lmao

former's voice was meant to "convey mass"

the gibbering sound emitted by the clumps you have to destroy to take down hiss barriers was made orally by someone in the design team

for ahti's sauna scene, they bought a sauna whisk (vihta or vasta in finnish) and recorded whisking one of their employees in a sauna at remedy's office. they have two saunas btw. "the good sauna and the downstairs sauna"

jim tottman came up with and prototyped the clog

the spinning, spiraling sound for the spin weapon form was made with fidget spinners; "the thing is, you need to buy the cheap shit, because it has much more character"

when held, power cubes make a faint sound that resembles purring. that's bc it was recorded from an actual kitten!

take control has a reverse audio portion with a spoken sequence of numbers, 1-19-7-1-18-4-9-19 (corresponding to the letters ASGARDIS), but when they made that song they didnt know yet how they were gonna actually use the numbers. so they put a side quest in the awe dlc where you have to insert the sequence into a clock to proceed.…. only to have someone go through all the combinations and brute force it open without knowing anything about the secret message in the song???

somewhere in upper central research (didn't see how to get there, julius forgot to change scene 😭) there is a pic featuring the audio team :) its a poster that says "pentatoxic waste" on it

devs were allowed to submit their own music to play in the game, so there are also posters for socks and ballerinas, a band by one of the devs. also, the area where you beat tommasi's ass has a radio that plays sorsa's music

sorsa and julius came dangerously close to revealing something about the doors in oceanview… tsk tsk tsk. no new info there though

about quantum break

for sorsa, the hardest sound to work on in quantum break was the dash sound; he did at least 100 different iterations for it and then handed it off to someone else lmao

quantum break's source code was in some way used to create the time dilation effect??? sorsa did not specify how he achieved this.

one of the outdoor recording sessions for quantum break involved lifting up and dropping cars with a 70 ton crane; "that was so fun :)"

about general sound design

you have to always consider how audio links up with visual

"silence and absence of sound is the single most important designer in the sound designer's arsenal of tools"; we are unaccustomed to silence, and adding a single sound to silence stands out and draws attention really well, prompting player to instinctively seek out the source of that sound

through the trial and error of trying to create one sound, you can discover sounds that work for something else that you could never have imagined on your own

a good mix will sound good even on low quality audio playback devices. for the final mix they do test on various consumer devices but for the past couple of games they havent had the time to focus on low dynamic mixes

accessibility considerations in the context of sound design are challenging because they come in late in a project, and it's easier the earlier it's considered. one way to approach this is to make sure the player is never guided by only by audio, or any one sense. (in quantum break they indicate the presence of collectibles using only the rumble feature, which sorsa thinks was a mistake in hindsight.) another approach: sorsa says he recently did a presentation on how music and sound could be presented kinetically.

processing and memory pose still pose some sound design limitations, but a lot less so than, say, ten years ago (during development of quantum break, it could take a whole ass hour to open up a level. if you opened the wrong one by accident… oops!). that said, sorsa feels that limitations are what guide creativity, and he personally favors "simplicity, and simple things interacting with each other"; complexity for complexity's sake is not an end in itself

sound designers do get the audio equivalent of writer's block sometimes. sorsa's approach to this is to just leave it be for a few days and let ideas simmer subconsciously

aside from wind, the most annoying thing about recording is people: passing cars, background talking, etc

remedy does not have a wilhelm scream of its own. some remedy folks have tried putting the actual wilhelm scream in their games, but have refrained; sorsa feels it hurts immersion

other:

sorsa added his personal(!), signed(!!) copy of the old gods of asgard LP to the stream giveaway 👑 absolute king shit. though he did add that if he sees that shit on ebay hes going to be "very sad"

saunas are not a sex thing!!! julius and sorsa (and me) felt very strongly about this when some jackass in chat called sauna whisking "kinky"

sorsa finds that people appreciate a call more than a message?? who is he fucking talking to that prefers calls. i guess he does work in audio

yellow as a color for guiding the player through an environment… "it just works" - plus changing the geometry of an area is a hassle where changing colors is easy

apparently an urban legend has it that overwatch used a bottle or can opening sound as the basis for their headshot indicator sound because it's really satisfying

next stream will be same time next week! so oct 30th, 2pm finland time