They're in the room with you

The immersive Audio of FEEDING_LOG_01172014

In FEEDING_LOG_01172013, you need to pause and play an anomalous video tape to avoid being caught by the monsters it documents. My main goal in creating FEEDING_LOG was to use spatial audio to make this game feel immersive in a way that I’d never seen before in an FMV game. When you play this game with headphones, you're meant to feel like the monsters are actually in the room with you! The trick is that while FEEDING_LOG looks like a video, it’s actually a 3D first-person game in disguise. As the video plays, a 3D camera is moved around a virtual version of the basement in lockstep with the live-action footage. You can see what that looks like here– the player is green, and the red and yellow tic-tacs are the monsters:

There are a couple other audio sources in the scene for ambience (like water dripping under a leaky pipe that appears a few minutes into the video and some ventilation fans scattered throughout), but I added those pretty close to the final deadline so I didn’t have time to color-code them. The actual process of syncing the movements of the player with the movements in the video was a massive pain–I did it by going through the video frame-by-frame and manually marking down every single movement made in the video. There was no trick or shortcut to it. Just suffering.

As a bonus, you can also see the place where I scribbled down the RGB and hex code of that particular shade of blue that you see in the backgrounds of VHS tapes. I spent a good portion of the final hours of Ludum Dare 50 digging through my production papers like a feral raccoon, screaming WHERE IS MY BLUE? WHERE IS MY BLUE? because I kept forgetting the color. After I made this sheet I realized that the Unity animation editor measured time in frames, not seconds, so I had to spend a solid twenty minutes with a calculator converting all of those time codes to frame numbers. The real monster in this game is carpal tunnel! Anyway, if you’re looking for a uniquely terrifying experience check out FEEDING_LOG_01172013! I guarantee your experience playing it will be almost as terrifying as my experience making it!