Developer Commentary 3: Updates, Sound in Layers, The Two Stories

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Developer Commentary 3: Updates, Sound in Layers, The Two Stories
Source: collected/024-developer-commentary-3-updates-sound-in-layers-the-two-stories.mp3
SHA-256: 39c11108e7469e950e0037fbca9b84f5ee0acf90331c9c456090b429dd9c984f
Model: scribe_v2 | Transcribed: 2026-10-10T18:12:55.038590+00:00
Machine transcript — uncorrected. Speaker labels are local to this recording and do not identify people.

[00:00:00.820] Speaker 1: Hello, this is Steven. So for today's developer commentary number three, I wanted to go over a couple different things. So we'll talk briefly about the story I just released, which was Soul Binder. And then I wanna talk about the upcoming production schedule and a little bit about what's coming up next. And then I wanna save the rest of the time to talk about really how I think about sound a-as, as it pertains to story. So we'll talk a little bit about that at the end, and how I think about sound design and how it contributes to the story.

[00:00:36.700] Speaker 1: So first off, uh, Soul Binder just came out. Uh, as per usual, there's not a lot of sound design lately, which saddens me, but I really wanna keep a production schedule. I've got an arbitrary goal of how many stories to release in one hundred days, and I really wanna hit that goal. So you'll-- as I've mentioned in the past, you'll see after these twelve stories are released, uh, the next two coming up, by the way, are Mortal Steel, which I'm working on now, uh, that's a fun one, and the last one is Imagiserum. And after that, I'll have all twelve

[00:01:11.700] Speaker 1: stories out with two episodes each. Um, and then I'm gonna slow down. I'm gonna slow down and do some proper sound design, really polish. Uh, and I think that's where I can kinda strut my stuff, and that'll be a great time for critical feedback on sound design especially. As I move away from focusing on narrative, uh, mostly writing, and I start focusing primarily on production, uh, directing, I'll have real voice actors. [laughs] So after these twelve stories are out, I'll probably just release a few developer

[00:01:46.120] Speaker 1: commentaries to tie you over, maybe some teaser stuff. And then I'm going to do a full production of one of these twelve stories. Uh, right now the front runners are probably Dust, uh, Fractality, maybe Velaxis. I think those three are all pretty good. I know I'm gonna do Summoner's Rulebook at some point. I don't know when. Uh, so we'll do a thirteen-episode season for each of these stories. I'm planning on doing two full seasons, and then I have something much bigger planned. Uh, so that's enough about what's coming

[00:02:21.040] Speaker 1: up. Uh, let's talk about Soul Binder. So Soul Binder came out. It is one of the sadder stories, uh, but, you know, sadness is a meaningful emotion as well. Uh, not everything can be fun and happy, although it certainly will have its lighthearted moments like everything. I can't help myself with that. Uh, it's got a very cool magic system. We got to see a little bit. Um, I won't give away too much, uh, but the way the magic system works is you can take, uh, attributes of anything in the real world around you and more or

[00:02:56.060] Speaker 1: less copy and paste them onto something else. Uh, there's a lot more to it than that, and you can combine things in interesting and dangerous ways. Uh, but it's called binding, and I think it's cool. And it's sort of a backdrop to the, the main story of Estus Darkwater, who is on a journey north. Yeah. So that's Soul Binder. Uh, we'll probably hear more of that story at some later date. Uh, yeah. And moving on to some more general how I think about story and sound stuff. So I wanted

[00:03:31.020] Speaker 1: to talk about sound in layers and how I go about creating sound for a story. So I think about my sound in layers. First, obviously, I do the voiceover for the narration and all of the characters first. So what I have at the beginning is basically a long audio track of just me speaking. In the future, we will have real voice actors, but I will continue to do the narration. So we're gonna have a voiceover track or voiceover tracks, and then where I start from there is creating atmospheres. So atmospheres are really your

[00:04:05.660] Speaker 1: lowest layer of sound. Uh, if you're an artist, a painter, this will be like, um, uh... it's like the background layers, you know, painting the scenery behind it, you know, broad colors. It's really the backdrop. So atmospheres are the bottom layer. Uh, they serve a couple purposes like immersion. So imagine getting onto a train, and you hear the sound of trains in the background, and you hear clinking, and you hear people talking. Just from

[00:04:40.520] Speaker 1: that sound alone, you can get a sense of place. So it's also important for clarity. So I can communicate an enormous amount of information simply by playing some sounds in the background. Uh, so that's what atmospheres are for. They're for immer-immersion, uh, and for the first few seconds, especially in a scene, they tell you where you are, uh, really where the characters are, which is where you are, at least in your mind. So that's what atmospheres are important for. For the first ten, fifteen seconds, uh, I play them pretty loud just so you can hear, "Okay, here's where they are. They're in a cave. They're on a train.

[00:05:15.980] Speaker 1: They're climbing stairs," right? "They're in a crowd." That sort of thing. Uh, so they're important for clarity at the beginning, and then they just kind of fall away into immersion. Uh, they don't ever completely disappear. Uh, I play around with atmospheres for other reasons as well, uh, but they really provide a sense of place. You know, chatter in the background, people talking, shopping, doors opening and closing, that kind of thing. So they're important for that. Uh, and for the most part, you don't notice them. So the next layer of sound is, uh, foley. So this is the term

[00:05:50.800] Speaker 1: for people picking things up. This is stuff that happens because people are doing things in the story. Uh, so you don't even notice it in things like film and TV, uh, because it's just kind of- Just part of the experience. But in sound, especially for an audio drama or audio drama audiobook, which is really what I'm making, somewhere between the two, it happens when people are walking, clapping, picking stuff up, setting stuff down. So it's kind of boring, but also

[00:06:25.824] Speaker 1: necessary. And what's interesting about Foley in a sound-only medium is that I can choose what sounds I want to play. In film and TV, they have a little less freedom there because, you know, somebody picks up a coffee cup and sets it down, you expect it to make some sound. But because I am painting the scene however I like, I can choose what to emphasize. So I have a little more freedom in Foley, and there's a little bit less of it. But it is important for immersion, but it's also important for communicating. There are some things which are easier to say. You know, he grabbed him by the back of the shirt and

[00:07:00.664] Speaker 1: pulled him close. And then put his arm around his neck. That can be easy to say in words. But sometimes it's easier to just say he slammed him against the wall by making the sound of somebody being slammed against the wall. And that communicates way more information. I don't have to tell you how hard he slammed him. I can tell you that by the grunt that they make when they hit the wall. Do they grunt loud in pain? Do you hear something break? Or is it just a gentle nudge, a push out of the way? I can communicate all of that with just a sound, right? I don't have to use words for it. So Foley

[00:07:35.564] Speaker 1: is useful for that. And the next layer is sitting on top of Foley, going up in importance, I guess. They're all important. They serve different roles. Certainly becoming less prevalent as we go up in layers. There's more atmospheres. There's less Foley. And even less is spot sounds. So these are the sounds that you notice immediately. The sound of gunshots or magic happening. These are the cool spotlight-taking sound effects. So the spot effects,

[00:08:11.404] Speaker 1: you spend a lot of time on them because they're cool and they step into the spotlight, which is a concept I'll talk about in a second. But spot effects are definitely the most noticeable ones. They're supposed to sort of break into your conscious attention. Whereas Foley and atmospheres kind of fade into the background most of the time. They certainly contribute and you notice when they're not there. And they convey information. But spot effects are really in your face. You know, this is the sound of like a creature growling, right? It's immediate and important. And there are

[00:08:46.444] Speaker 1: very few of them. But they're kind of what you think about when you think about sound. Even though they're actually some of the most uncommon sound effects. At least by volume. So those are the different layers. And there's also voice modulation. I do this some. So some of it is not so much creating a new sound as modulating existing sounds. So if a character is in a cave or in a tiny room or they have a mask on, they're going to sound different. And that's important for immersion. I don't do it too often, but I do it some. So

[00:09:21.404] Speaker 1: that's the last kind of sound design that I'll talk about. So now that we've got those pieces of sound, what do we do with them, right? I don't know if you've heard this before, but it's very easy to make sound design annoying. I'm sure you've heard it, you know, in some of my stories as I've been practicing. It's very easy to make the sound like an atmosphere take over everything. It's too loud. It's too intrusive. And you may not have noticed this consciously. You may have just turned off the story, whatever you're listening to, without knowing why. Maybe just a sense of

[00:09:56.164] Speaker 1: anxiousness. And it's because the background sounds may be too loud or too intrusive. So that brings up the idea of telling two stories. I like to think of sound design and the written story as two different tellings of the same story. And they each contribute in their own way. So there's two stories. There's the first story, which is the one that you're being told, like right now. These are my words, or the actor's words in the case of dialogue. So if you were to print out the script, that would be the first

[00:10:30.964] Speaker 1: story. The second story is the story being told by sound. And it's often in the background, which is the reason it's called the second story. For the most part, the second story supports the first story in interesting and meaningful ways. Like I've described, sometimes it is easier to tell the story with the second story. Instead of saying, wasting all of our time with, he picked up the coffee cup and set it back down. I can just pick up the coffee cup and set it back down with sound. And that's the second story telling the story. So sometimes they tell the same

[00:11:05.664] Speaker 1: story. In an action scene, you know, I can say he ran down the hallway, and then you hear some footsteps going down a hallway, right? So they're both telling the same story. But there are times when only the first story is happening. These are like the character's inner thoughts. Or I'm giving some background on the world or their past, right? So in that case, the first story is telling one story, but the second story is either muted, there is no background sound, or it's playing some sort of atmospheric music, right? It's supporting the first story a little bit, but for the most part, it's telling a different story.

[00:11:41.024] Speaker 1: And then there are times when the first story is not at all important, and the second story is far more important. Like when a creature is growling at you. It's just easier to tell the sound, the story with sound, than it is to actually come in and write it with words. It's kind of lame. So there's a balance there. Most of the time, the second story supports the first story. But there are times when the second story becomes more important. That is, it steps into the spotlight. And knowing when to say something with words and when to say it with sound is

[00:12:16.004] Speaker 1: a constant balancing act, which I am still learning. And there are times when redundancy is annoying. He walked down the hall. You hear walking sound effects. If you do that every time, it will be so annoying. Trust me. I've done it. It gets obnoxious, right? There becomes a time when the second story, the sound story, becomes intrusive. It's ruining your imagination because it's too much sound. So you want just enough sound to indicate what is happening, but not so much that it's overwhelming.

[00:12:51.144] Speaker 1: So that is a constant challenge, the balance between the first and second story, knowing which one has the spotlight. Which one am I focused on? For the most part, it's the first story. But there are times when you need to move the sound into the spotlight. And that's something I'm still learning. But it's very interesting. And it provides really a second channel of information that you can't get from just audiobooks. So there you have it. I think that's all I wanted to say about sound. So there's sound in layers in review. I approach it constructing from the ground up. I start with the

[00:13:25.744] Speaker 1: voiceover. I add the atmospheres. And then I add the Foley. Then I add the spot effects. And then somewhere in there, I do voice modulation for reverb and other stuff like that. And then the other concept we talked about is the two stories. There's the first story, which is the written story, what I sit down and write. And then there's the second story, the story I'm telling with sound. There you have it. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you enjoyed getting a little bit of my thought process. I'd love to hear your feedback as I improve. Thanks so much for listening. And you'll hear more from me next

[00:14:00.484] Speaker 1: week with Mortal Steel.