Sound and music
The game’s music and sounds should be divided into two different thematic areas – game world and the player’s screen. One with focus on portraying the vast and merciless world, the other on conveing the use of older tech.
UI sounds
To create an immersive soundtrack for the management game, it is crucial to make comfortable sounds for the UI and menu’s elements. The UI should convey the experience of using old tech, big keyboards and old screens while the menu’s should be distinctly generic in their sound. The UI is portraying the experience of using an old computer. It should beep in some irregular intervals, even have some scrambled communications sometimes, background electronic noise and dialing. It should all be handled with care as to not overwhelm but support the experience of the player. UI sounds should be present when the game is in their management screens. It should be dialed down or put into deep backgroud when any event is in play – when the event window pops up.
The menu sounds are a differnt thing. Those are the elements not connected to gameplay and should be differnt and more modern in sounding. They should be quiter and less characteristic with no noise and just as a feedback to starting/loading/saving the game or interacting with its settings.
The UI sounds inspirations:
Game world sounds
The game world sounds are needed for the events poping up with their own window. The ambience and sounds should be developed with care towards the events themsleves with different tempos – refleting the direness of the situation, tension or lack thereof. I would suggest only couple of instruments at once and for example with a lot of accents put on melancholy for events centered on human survivors asking for help or finding out that they have suffered greatly or accents put on tension and high tempo when dealing with agressive and hostile survivors. The music should embody the event in a way that the player can easily recognise the core type of the situation presented before them.
The game world sounds can incorporate the voicover of the family characters – the advice that they give can be read aloud when clicking for it. In this case it should be mixed with the reality of speaking through a radio transmitter – a little distorted and distant, but understandable.
Events sounds inspiration: