Hi everyone!
If things have seemed a little quiet lately on the Prismata front, fear not! We’ve been diligently working behind the scenes on a number of important projects that are essential for Prismata’s release—scaling up our back end architecture, building a great tutorial, enhancing Prismata’s graphics, and designing a riveting single-player campaign.
One additional project (which has stood mostly neglected until now) is Prismata’s sound design. Indeed, the current alpha sound effects in the game are all temporary audio clips that we put together with a very low level of effort. Now that Prismata itself is much further along, we’ve begun the process of implementing actual sound design for the game. Helping us with this undertaking is my good friend Arnej Secerkadic.
Introducing Arnej!
We’re thrilled to welcome Arnej to our team of artists helping us bring the world of Prismata to life.
Arnej Secerkadic is a multi-talented Toronto-based sound designer, musician, and DJ. I’ve known Arnej for many years, and when it came time to recruit somebody to produce sound effects for Prismata, I could think of no one better. Before becoming known internationally as an electronic music producer, Arnej spent much of his career doing audio work for S2 Games, including the fantastic sound design for Heroes of Newerth. If you’ve never heard of HoN, it was the frontrunner entry in the MOBA genre quite early on, and Arnej’s sound work has been a major inspiration behind the sound design in titles like League of Legends and Dota 2.
We can’t wait to share more of Arnej’s work with you in the upcoming months!
Prismata’s Sound Design
So what exactly have we planned for Prismata’s sound design? Well, in addition to a rich set of menu and interface SFX, we’re going to be doing custom sound work for every unit in the game.
Prismata’s units will be getting a full dose of robotic clanks, futuristic hums, and visceral battlecries. Each unit will have unique sounds for enter-the-battlefield triggers, click abilities, and more. Many units (especially ones on the blue branch of the tech tree) will be getting voiceovers, though most of it will be through vocal synthesizers or vocoders (we promise not to subject you to any terrible voice acting!)
We’re still brainstorming ideas for some of the awesome and hilarious quips you’ll hear from the different Prismata units. We’re especially excited about some of our ideas for the unique 1-supply units.
For example… What should a unit like Apollo say when you snipe an enemy target? Here are some options:
- “Target acquired.”
- “Excellent choice.”
- “I had selected the same target.”
- “Vaporizing.”
- “Ouch.”
Should it randomly choose from a list of choices? Should it say something special when you snipe an ultra-vulnerable unit like Lucina Spinos? The options are incredibly exciting!
If you’ve got any feedback or sound design requests for any units in Prismata, we encourage you to leave them in our suggestion box.
One More Thing…
Big changes are coming to Prismata’s Armory, Arena Mode, and Black Lab in the upcoming days. We’ve already talked about these changes, though some things have changed a bit since we first announced them. Additionally, we’ll be giving out a number of free Black Lab cards as holiday gifts in the upcoming week. Stay tuned for a post this week on that!
