Week 3
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Dead Space is a third person shooter sci-fi horror game, you’re playing as Isaac Clarke, and the master engineer on a mission to repair a vast mining ship, the USG Ishimura. Only to arrive at the ship and discover something has taken a turn for the worst, everything reeks of a horrible smell, papers are thrown everywhere in chaos, and the walls are seeping with mucus? Blood? Where is everyone?
You discover the ship’s crew has been slaughtered and your, or rather, Isaac’s beloved partner Nicole, is lost somewhere on board. The unsettling environment gives a sense of urgency, the desperation to leave feels like a throbbing headache ever getting more intense.
“Now alone and armed with only his engineering tools and skills, Isaac races to find Nicole as the nightmarish mystery of what happened aboard the Ishimura unravels around him. Trapped with hostile creatures called Necromorphs, Isaac faces a battle for survival, not only against the escalating terrors of the ship but against his own crumbling sanity.” (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693980/Dead_Space/)
“How can we scare people just with sound? No monsters, no nothing” Dan Schofield, creator and director of Dead Space
Dan Schofield, Creator and Director of Dead Space
Unique sound design
This game has interactive scenes filled with dialogue and has a deep plot, but it would not be much of the video game that it is without its sound effects and clever techniques behind the sound design.
The sound effects of Necromorphs ripping at your flesh as soon as they have a grip, the Ripper weapon which is a rotary saw making a loud sharp ripping (hence the name) sound upon coming in contact with enemies. Take a look at this clip from the game, where a user captures background sounds of whispers, ambient music, all perfectly capturing the insanity that Isaac is being driven to.
Behind the sound: Glen Schofield (Creator/Director of Dead Space)
For the following video, I recommend watching all of it, but for sake of sticking to the point I would skip to these minutes as they are relevant to sound design technique: 4:06-5:45
Basically to sum up the whole video, which again it’s worth watching all of it, a creator/developer of Dead Space talks about the mechanics of how they accomplished such intense motion graphics for the game, the dialogue scenes, sound design and realistic character motions. Highly recommend at least checking out the first minute if you can’t handle fake blood and gore.
What really stuck with me when I first watched this video was when I watched the moment where Glen Schofield talks about how they used a foley technique of manually recording capturing noise from a public train and used it for the game. It was described as the worst sound in the history of man, because of how eerie, loud and exaggerated it sounds like in real life.
I decided to write about this because it’s fascinating to me how sound can be the essence of a project. In this case, it was Dead Space, which took the game to another level with just the audio alone because the developers purposely focused on the sound from the beginning to the end and built the game around the idea “How can we scare people just with sound?”
Vivian is 23 years old, currently studying Digital Content Creation. She specializes in Digital Design & enjoys all forms of art.
She dedicates her time to creating her own forms of art and collaborating with other artists and individuals to execute art projects.