Celeste is still considered a top-tier platformer three years after its release. The game’s engaging platforming mechanics kept us on our toes while its illustration of depression and anxiety kept it relatable; all of it was neatly packed with a wonderful OST. However, according to Kevin Regamey, creative director at PowerUpAudio, Celeste’s dialogue design is the number one most-asked-about topic (thanks GameRant).
PowerUpAudio was the studio that worked on the game’s sound design, so Regamey decided to detail out just how the studio came up with the cute dialogue sounds made by the game’s characters. In a long Twitter thread, the creative director went into deep technical detail about how the sounds were created.
Each character voice was first allotted a general tone via simple synth sounds. This would be based on the character and their background. The next step involved setting up how that tone would change over time. To carve these generic synth sounds into something resembling human speech, the studio modelled ‘formants’, naturally occurring spectral peaks in human vowel sounds. These were then spaced out to resemble how a human voice may transition between vowels.
The most interesting part however, involved bringing in emotion to these sounds. The team broke down various emotions based on pitch. “Is the emotion generally high or low in pitch? Does the pitch stay in one place, or move around a lot? Is the speech slow and careful, or is it rapid and pointed? What kind of pitch movement should we hear, and what kinds of sentences are these sounds representing?” wrote Rehamey.
The rest of the process was a bit more technical, you can check out the entire Twitter thread to learn how the team at PowerUpAudio eventually created the dialogue sounds.
The next project by Extremely OK Games is called Earthblade, “A 2D explor-action game in a seamless pixel art world.” The game was announced in April and no release date has been fixed for it as of yet. All we’ve got for now is a “vibe reveal”, but the developers mentioned that more details will come soon and we should “be sure to point your feet away from animals and small children, and prepare for your footwear to be blasted clean off your feet.”