Sound and Music of Orion’s Leap

The Vision
Orion’s Leap was pitched as an intergalactic, raypunk, parkour, virtual reality game with a swinging ability to make it possible to get around like Spider-Man..Needless to say I needed absolutely zero convincing to be apart of producing. Myself and two other audio producers would work together to create the level soundtracks and in game sound effects to help bring this idea to life. We decided to make this happen by splitting the audio assets into three and creating them separately, submitting them to the game developers for feedback and refining until everyone was happy.
The initial meeting went well, choosing our preferred assets and soundtracks to work on and listening to the project managers music references for what he wanted the game to sound like but in hindsight, keeping a unified aesthetic and merging our three styles into the one production probably should have been given more consideration. Hearing the reference track and listening to each others assets was how we made this happen but in the end our different styles definitely showed; Not saying that’s a bad thing but with more time or planning more collaborative composing would have been interesting to experiment with.
The reference soundtrack was Jodorowsky’s Dune, a soundtrack for a movie that was never made. The soundtrack uses mostly analog synths and chanting and give an almost psychedelic induced lost in space feeling, lots of arpeggiated instruments and layering of sounds to fill the spectrum.

Production
First task was to develop some communication lines to keep everyone on the same page; Other than regular meetings we used the app dischord, where you can text chat, voice chat, create channels for and share links and media with the group. This is where we shared works in progress for feedback and kept up to date with the progress of the game, we even had voice chat meetings. I found having a place to get instant feedback really helpful through the production phase.

My plan was to create templates in Ableton for all the stages of production (composing, mixing, mastering, SFX layering, SFX mixing) then record all the live samples I anticipated using for making the sound effects and choose the vst plugins I planned to use for the music and sounds then go from there. In hindsight I would have made more use of the analog synths available in the campus studio’s, composing the melodies and lines into MIDI and getting sounds from them but it was valuable getting to know my virtual instruments more.
SFX
Going into production I knew I wanted to make the sounds and music have a fantastical quality where even my recorded samples for example the melee blade sounds were mixed with a frequency shifter and a chorus to give it a slight spacey, futuristic layer.
Taken to a more exaggerated level with the players’ ray gun blaster which I made to sound what I imagined a slower shooting cartoon ray gun sounds like layering some synth lead sounds with the attack of an electronic snare hit and mixing them to give them gun a shoot and charge ‘character’.
One of the challenges faced was creating a generator sound that fit the design, I first made a version that didn’t have an obvious motor sound:
But this loop sounded too close to a hovering sound already made and they game developer wanted a more obvious generator sound with a motor. To achieve this I layered the first sound with a recording of a running sewing machine that I edited to sound bigger using compression and boosting certain frequencies:
Music
My first task for music was to create a soundtrack for the cityscape which would be the main area acting as a node that you can access the other areas from, design wise it took inspiration from the images below.


When I interpreted these inspirations and having the music reference in mind I set out to make an energetic, almost confusing synth based track to go with the packed, busy look of the city. Here’s the first demo:
The feedback received was the lead sounds and layered arpeggiated synths were too in your face and busy, they requested a more ambient heavy track, with softer sounds that would add to the scene without taking away focus of the gameplay or getting in the way of the sound effects. This is the final version of the cityscape soundtrack:
To complement encountering combat throughout the game we decided to have two tracks that would fade in and out dynamically depending on what’s happening in the game. To do this I made a more energetic, dangerous sounding track using similar elements and of the same length so that they would blend smoothly when changes happen. This is the final version I came up with:
Post Production Reflection
The project overall was a success with all assets being complete and implemented and will be playable by the end of this week when I will update this post to include gameplay impressions and a reflection of how the sounds and music effects sound in the virtual reality environment. The original scope of the project had to be downsized to only have one theme track per area rather than two which was a quality over quantity trade off. I had a great time working with a team that knew what they wanted and using dischord to communicate and organise the project. The things I would like to change for next time while working within an audio team are trying more collaborative composing and creating the sound effects to learn from each other and challenge myself to create assets working closer together with other producers.
