This page contains just a few details of my involvement in the project. I will continue to update it and add more details while the game develops (and when I get the time to!).
Since late 2023 I have had the pleasure of working with the team at Catalyst Games on the cozy-adventure RPG Dungeons and Dining Tables, a game where you play as an axolotl on a quest to decorate their house. This little axolotl and the team around it have since become key figures in my life and I consider myself privileged to be a part of the project’s development.
My Role
While I joined the team partway through the development of the project, I have still been involved since quite early in the development timeline as a composer, sound designer, and also as a programmer responsible for almost all integration of audio. This has allowed me to deeply integrate both music and sound into the game and with cross-pollination of the two together, from birds that tweet the melody of the area that you are in, to music that mixes between highly orchestrated pieces to music for jazz quartet, to custom designed logic allowing sounds to be obscured by objects in the game-world.
The Gameplay and My Approach
While I can’t share too much currently, the steam page has a good overview of the the gameplay:
Dungeons and Dining Tables is a Cozy-Adventure RPG where you play as an Axolotl on a quest to decorate their house and defeat the termites out to eat their furniture!
Randomly generated dungeons to explore with puzzles to complete, enemies to defeat and rare furniture loot to collect. Travel through the World Tree, take on new rogue-like challenges and defeat bosses for the most epic of furnishings (maybe even a Legendary Bed of Maximum Health!)
Furniture collected on a dungeon run can be used to decorate not only your humble home but also the homes of the cute and quirky characters of the town of Kindlerest! Decorating your home will give you comfy points that are used to level up your house, improve player stats, upgrade shops and other quality of life features for your dungeon runs.
Considering the gameplay, my approach to the audio has been to make it as dynamic and responsive to the gameplay as possible, with reactive music and sound design that not only compliments but heightens the user experience. This is best exemplified by the music of the town Kindlerest, which is a cosy orchestral piece (with some hustle-and-bustle for good measure) that transitions seamlessly to a jazz quartet piece (Pine for a Tune) while you are decorating your house via some simple layering in FMOD.
My Inspiration
Throughout the project my inspiration has been drawn from a variety of sources. Primarily and probably unsurprisingly, I have drawn a lot of inspiration from the art style itself and in particular the animations done by the extremely talented Ty Hemi. The art style and animations are so full of character that it is difficult not to be inspired by them and as a result my sound design work tries to reflect the same character and charm.
I have also of course taken a lot of inspiration from games that have been significant to my development as a composer and as a sound designer. The games that have inspired me the most include Super Mario Galaxy and many games from the The Legend of Zelda series, in particular the approach to the sound design of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is also impossible to ignore the influence of the Animal Crossing series, in particular Animal Crossing: New Horizons which is most evident in the UI sounds.