About the game
Slam your way through waves of viruses and hurl your friends through cyberspace in this flashy arcade thrower that combines classic twin-stick action with inventive physics for an electrifying adventure.
The game has launched on May 21, 2024 on PC.
A bullet-hell game with a colorful cyber style, dynamic music and audio for a satisfying gaming experience.
Sonic Signature
I created the game sound style with the game director from early development to release.
Menu & Gameplay Sound
Audio from the interactive world map, through to combat gameplay, UI/UX integration, announcements & rewards.
Audio Implementation
Implementing all audio across the games menus, gameplay, levelups and celebrations in FMOD Studio and Unity.
My Work
I have been the sole sound designer for Cyberpulse since 2019, and since have supported the game throughout its entire development pipeline all the way from establishing an exciting crystalline-meets-digital sound palette to implementing all of this content in creative and interactive ways with FMOD Studio and Unity to support its innovative physics-based gameplay.
The design covered the full single-player campaign featuring a world map with over 50 levels, the couch co-op and competitive player versus player modes.
01
Creating the Synthetic Soundscape
Here is an example of the kind of FX chain that was used to achieve the sound of Cyberpulse's announcer, which is a synthetic voice created through the use of Image Line's Vocodex plugin and a chain of McDSP's Futzbox plugins running in parallel and Waves H-Delay effects.
Parameterizing the Mix
02
One of the ways in which we were able to curate and adjust the game's mix that was interesting was through adjusting both volume and bass frequencies allowed in the case of the events that were re-used on boss levels.
The aim was to keep the bosses feeling punchy and dangerous while still allowing enough room in the soundscape for the bombastic synthwave score, this was achieved through a careful tailoring and parameterizing of the game' mix.
03
Physics Driven Sound Design
Being that Cyberpulse is a game that makes use of Unity physics to make the throwing and movement of objects fun, we wanted to support that in the sound implementation where appropriate and found a good use case for a thrown firewall/fireball which is a moving cube that can eliminate viruses upon contact.
The firewall can contact with any number of different surface types in our game, and we wanted to drive the sound of its speed through cyberspace with various loops and the power of it impacting with an acceleration parameter (see left).
The volume, drive, pitch and even sound sources are all modulated by how forcefully the firewall will impact a surface in this scenario, which is even further refined by a tweak of the parameter's seek speed value.
