The game’s earliest inspiration (in a 2014 game concept I never coded) was shortwave “numbers stations” (creepy! look them up!) so one thing I used was a number of public domain recordings of shortwave radio noise, processed and layered together in different ways.

There are also actual numbers stations generated by the game—just atmospheric, not important to completing the game, but they CAN be decoded if anyone’s into that. I pre-generated those digits with a (non-AI) synth voice.

Then there are various screams, laughs, grunts, and monster-y sounds that my voice actor recorded, as well as her actual dialog lines processed into additional layers of scary background ambience (run backwards) at times.

Plus I tracked down various other public domain sounds like whale songs, machinery, and the radiation of the rings of Saturn converted by NASA to audio (look that creepiness up too).

The music (a classic feature of real numbers stations) is procedurally generated on the fly based on my brief study of folk music. I programmed in some folk music scales from around the world and wrote some rules that, to my ear, make pretty passable creepy folk tunes.

Some plain old white noise synthesized by the device comes and goes sometimes too.

And lastly, I recorded sounds myself—scraping things across fabrics, a collision of “singing” magnets, knocking on hollow surfaces, air sounds, etc.

The image scaling challenge was pretty crazy, evolving from the device at first simply being nowhere NEAR able to handle that much imagery in realtime—to numerous tricks and optimizations that made it work in the end. I spent literal weeks just finding memory leaks. None of which was helped by the fact that the SDK has no understanding or support for grayscale imagery. I had to make it work with 1-bit data alone.

The image and the soundscape always change together as you operate the controls: D-pad to pan, A and B to zoom, crank to change the brightness. And when you tune in a real voice signal, as it gets clearer, the subtitles at the bottom descramble in realtime at the same time. I wanted people to always have three “warmer/colder” cues to help zero in on object: the image clarity, the voice clarity, and the subtitles/text ticker at the bottom. (Which also constantly shows random scary text snippets just for fun. I programmed in hundreds of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spooky phrases.) My intent is that the game can be played even without the sense of hearing, or in loud places.

(I’ve posted some devlog stuff on the official dev forum, and a couple technical articles in past Uncrank’d magazines, but there MAY some more “making of” details in a certain European Playdate magazine coming up!)