Poly-Vinyl Pests!

Platform: PC, Arcade Developed in Unity

Poly-Vinyl Pests! is a two-player twin-stick shooter boss-rush action game. You and your friend take on the role of two ant colonies, sending out your drones to win glory for the colony.

My role on Poly-Vinyl Pests! (PvP!) during the fall semester was as the team's acting sound designer, working on the background music for boss fights, sound effects for all the attacks and bosses, and mixing that together to add a layer of depth to the overall experience. Now that PvP! was greenlit for a second semester, I've evolved to not only refine the game's current sound profile, but also aid in designing the upgrade system, a pivotal feature in enhancing the replayability of the arcade nature of PvP!

As the team's lead sound designer, most of my philosophy focused on creating engaging metal tracks that boosted the excitement of players in boss battles. In addition to mixing those tracks and mastering them together, using a custom C# sound program, I was able to effectively create music in phases for different sections of the boss fight without use of middleware programs. The Laundry Snail, our first boss, has two themes that play: one for the stationary phase and the other for when the shell breaks and phase 2 begins. This program also helped in setting up the theme for the second boss which followed the same philosophy; adding in more layered tracks each time a new part of the boss appeared.

Laundry Snail Boss Theme (Final Mixing with EQs):

Mushroom Boss (Final Mix):

The third fight, the Wax Wyrm, had a different approach to the music design considering it's 2.5 phase boss fight. With the boss fight starting out (at first there's just a grouping of larvae rolling around trying to kill the player), the music is very low key but still has the rumblings of a much more terrifying theme. This not only foreshadows what's more to come, but additionally with marimba still gives the player a slight sense of ease because they're just fighting little guys, they're not so harmful right now.

Once it gets to phase two, "The Dragon Phase", the last rolling larvae transforms into a giant beast that immediately roars at the player to establish dominance over the player. This is when the organ and real guitar riffs come in to establish not only the imposing metal, but the organs give an archaic feeling to the boss fight that signifies the dragon as this massive entity that is the culmination of PVP!. At the beginning and end of the fights there are reall y fast guitar riffs ideologically lifted from Dragonforce and other similar power metal tunes that kick the guitar's speed up to 11 sounding like not only an impossibly hard track to play by human hands, but once again imposing stress over the player in this final boss fight. Later on, when the Wax Wyrm summons other larvae, the marimba comes back in to signify this half blend of phases.

Most of the musical patterns were based off of the design philosophy of games like Hades or the Binding of Isaac: taking a melodic pattern and throwing multiple layers on top of it to create music that has familiar tunes in it that can be hummed by players, but also that feels like it moves around without getting stale, creating dynamic and moving fight music.

In addition to that, I sampled a lot of the sound effects with live recording and ran it through Logic Pro's quick sampler to give these realistic sounds (i.e. a water bottle being slammed on a desk or me attempting to spit into the microphone) a synthetic edge to them with phaser and modulation, turning the ordinary into the strange and weird.

On top of all the composition, field recording, and foley work that went into developing the game's overall sound profile, I was heavily involved in our team's other big process, developing the arcade cabinet that we house on campus as part of a tradition with the school's capstone program. There my role as the sound designer pivoted from the more artistic back into the technical side as it was part of my role to set up and construct the audio kit that would be installed into the final cabinet, as well as making myself available to the team for the full cabinet's assembly

The Team (IDX Legends):

Production: Autumn Grandell & Eric Cowette

Art: Lucas Trudeau, Jasmine Leong, and Ian Bee

Programming: Jeffrey Popek, Thomas Smith, and Benjamin Stone

Design: Jake Hopkins, Trace McLaurin, Jonathan Cui, Ethan Vawter, and Peter Newman

Sound: Braeden Trefethen & myself