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During a 48 hour game jam hosted by Climax, I created a fun game together with ten other developers to raise money for charity.
Our plan for this game was to create a game that would look inviting and wholesome at first, only to then surprise you with over-the-top gruesome violence. A little bit like Happy Tree Friends. I was in charge of audio direction and most of my focus for the weekend was to facilitate this juxtaposition of cute and gruesome.
During the game jam I contributed many sound effects to the game. I created cute and wholesome hops and magic spells, and gruesome chomps and screams to juxtapose them. In addition to this silly and over-the-top style, the game was set in a medieval fantasy setting, so I created an equally silly bard core soundtrack to go along with it.
To emphasize the contrast between cute and gruesome that happy treefriends is known for, I used contrast between sounds. I created cute little hops using a synth in my DAW. This gave a clean and sweet gamey feel to the base movement. Then I recorded myself screaming, and used guttural sounds for the bite sound to create a very raw and realistic feel for the violence.
This ended up feeling a little bit out of place at first, so I pitched up the screams to make it sound a little bit more silly gruesome than just pure horror. This way it also fits better with the locomotion sounds of the bunnies.
Our game was silly and over-the-top, and is set in a medieval bunny land. To invoke the silliness of the game while also being time-efficient, I decided to make a ragtime cover. However, to make the music allude to the medieval time period, I decided to make a bardcore cover. The time-appropriate instruments help ground the music in the game world, while the crazy tempo and patterns of the Charlston Rag invoke that silly mood I was going for.