Audio in Frog Sqwad is all about elevating gameplay and honing in on the chaos and comedy of the experience; living your best froggy life, storming the sewers, licking your friends and eating and vomiting delicious snacks for the glory of the Swamp King!
The soundtrack pulls from a real mix of flavours: from Bossa Nova and Funk to heavy-hitting Future Bass and UK grime; playfully blended into a cross-genre audio experience.
One of my favourite things about working on games that don’t take themselves too seriously is that you get to make stupid decisions like using dog barks and out-of-tune clown horns as melodic instruments.
[This was our first Panic Stations get together and I sampled this Clown Horn which ended up in the Soundtrack!]
Game soundtracks play a vital role in what players feel, so it’s important to build something emotionally distinctive that resonates with what the player is experiencing. There’s a subtle distinction between composers who exclusively produce music commercially and musicians and producers who have more mileage creating music from the heart. It’s the difference between a piece of music that sounds like stock music versus something that really taps into your being.
This is why I chose to work with Jim & Will from Koan Sound and they absolutely smashed it out the park!
We decided to lean into froggy basslines, funky rhythms, memorable motifs and a slightly scrappy production feel to match the visual direction of the game. The top-end treble is fairly dark and muted to allow the game’s SFX to sing and cut through.
[FL STUDIO is our DAW of choice - it’s what you do with the tools that matters most!]
In the hub, we went for cozy lo-fi swampy vibes - kick back and chill with your friends, slap on your favourite hat and gear up for your first run.
When you first enter the sewers you’re greeted with a feel-good soundtrack that’s more laid-back, and as you progress deeper into the depths, things heat up as you face a more hostile environment, conveyed through an increasingly faster and more aggressive soundtrack to escalate the tension. By the time players reach The Underpipes, you’ve really got to lock in or things can go horribly wrong!
Short stingers are used throughout the game to reinforce success, failure and the pressure of time. Some of these were designed almost like meme sound effects to communicate the emotional state of your run.
The tone of the game presented us with an opportunity to add a lot of humour and physicality to player interactions.
Picture a serious music producer clicking through hundreds of snare drum sounds to find the ‘perfect snare’ - I had the joy of doing this instead for boings, bubble pops, squelches, farts, squeaks, slaps and the like. Laughter was my audio compass and if I was already cracking up whilst designing the sounds before they’d even reached the build, I knew I was likely on to a winner.
Working remotely has a lot of challenges, but one of the highlights is hearing your team react excitedly and laugh at the sounds you’ve chucked into the game. My partner would often tell me I was having too much fun as I’d spontaneously burst into laughter throughout the day.
In keeping with the wider Panic Stations philosophy, the soundtrack and audio design were built rapidly, and we prioritised:
Rough ideas, character and feeling over technical perfection
Looping structures that allowed us to fluidly weave motifs throughout the soundtrack
Gut feeling and intuition over data-informed choices - when it comes to creative decision making, if things resonate strongly with the dev team, chances are they’ll ripple outwards into your audience too
For our first title, I’m genuinely proud and feel like we’ve cooked something that feels chaotic, playful and unmistakably Frog Sqwad.