Ivan Berlin

Sightless

Project Summary

Sightless is a wave-based survival game set in a dark, spooky environment. Your character is an eye that’s been cursed shut and left in the dark to fight off open eyes, which shoot lasers at you, impede your movement, and maintain an eternal onslaught. Since you have no weapons, you must trick the lasers doggedly tracking you into hitting your opponents instead.

Project Role(s)

I created the game’s music and sound effects. I made three songs as well as sound effects for lasers charging up, lasers blasting, and player death. The three songs are each for different “stages” in the game: “Foresight” is an ambient, very loopable track for the title screen, “Enter the Eye” is the first combat track that serves as a bridge between the main title theme and the more intense gameplay to come, and “Transduction” is the track that plays once you’ve survived enough rounds and the difficulty spikes up. As you may see (pun intended), I decided that the title of the songs should suit the game’s theme in addition to the actual music itself.

What I Learned

Right off the bat, this jam taught me that each jam requires different musical approaches. Since Sightless was in such a different genre than Ecna Lab Breaker, I had to learn and implement new techniques. I have carried this lesson with me through future jams. I also learned that the input of fellow team members is crucial regardless of their role. One of my team members programming the game suggested I listen to “The Door” from HBO’s Chernobyl series, as he believed its sinister and recurring, yet ambient nature could be a good inspiration for our game’s style. I incorporated the types of elements that I felt were most impactful from the song into “Foresight” and “Enter the Eye”.

I did this by using techniques such as ring modulating the hi-hats and continuously panning the bell chime to create a sense of spatial confusion as to where the source of the music was coming from. This was meant to emulate and enhance being surrounded by enemies in gameplay. “Enter the Eye” maintains this atmosphere with a mysterious sloshing ambient drone that gradually gets louder, leading to the drum groove truly establishing itself to inspire player movement around the arena. “Transduction”, however, takes more after the soundtrack to Hades, as I believe Darren Korb’s music captures that sense of flowing around a combat environment that we wanted to achieve. To ensure that the different intensity and style songs fit together well, I incorporated a motif into all of the tracks, albeit in different contexts. The motif is present in the synth for “Foresight”, the drum kit’s melodic one-shots for “Enter the Eye”, and the backing guitar for “Transduction”.