Team Member Spotlight: Marc Jacobs (Not the Fashion Designer)

Marc Jacobs, Sound Lead

Sound Effects

For all the sound effects within Grave Mistakes, I try to mesh a balance between slight morbid comedy, and realism within all the sounds of the world. This, while fun to do, is a delicate balance between either too loud or too weak; the line is really thin but when a sound effect succeeds when layered with other sounds it creates more of a world that breaths life through itself. My process for sound comes from first planning a sound by watching videos about a certain sound for example watching a video where gators hiss to get a feel for the sound. After that I find a sound online that can either be that exact sound or modify for a stand-in, and then hand off that reference to the sound team I work along with. Next, the team and I go through a couple versions of sounds on what we can create/use, and pick through the best ones to set up for the final set up as well as setting their levels to lock into place perfectly.

Music

The music within Grave Mistakes is a process that takes pieces and aspects from all of the game elements to complement the feel of the game as the player progresses. The feel of the environment and action really ends up driving the music tracks on where they go feeling-wise. This is one aspect of the game that I really wanted to drive home: the creepiness; not so much the quirky humor in game as that is taken care of by the sound effects and gameplay. When layering the music of the game I put music as low as I can to really mesh the music tracks to the world, and its surroundings.

Dialogue

When it comes to the dialogue of Grave Mistakes, we dealt 3 very professional student actors that really gave the game a voice, pardon the pun. Without the talented work of (insert jean-bap’s actor here), Dylan Ruggiero, and Nick Schaeffer the characters of Jean-Baptiste, Samedi, and The Baron respectively there would be no life in this game about spirits, cats, dead bodies, and barons. I also worked with my talented recording partner Nikki Myers to record the audio to perfection, and processing the audio into clean tracks to make the audio more natural to the world, and feel as if the characters came to life in their undead world.