Inside Battle Slots: Composer/Sound Designer Adam Gill

Hello my name is Adam Gill and I am the composer/sound designer on Battle Slots.  I created all of the sound effects and composed most of the music for the game. I would like to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about the process that went into it.

Music

Early on in the project there were two main challenges with the creation of the music for the game.  The first challenge was to determine the overall style and tone of the compositions.  After generating a few tracks that fit more into the film music genre it was suggested to me by one of the artist/designers, Kent Stowe, that we try to go more for a traditional video game type soundtrack that drew inspiration from classic RPGs.  As a fan of video games, I’ve always appreciated games with great music.  Some of my favorites, which either consciously or subconsciously influenced my work on this game, would include the Castlevania series, the Final Fantasy series, and the Zelda series.  All of these games feature not only very catchy and amazing music, but music that is all over the place stylistically.  I tried to keep this idea of not having genre limitations in mind as I was composing the soundtrack for Battle Slots.

The second challenge was to come up with a method of music playback that would accentuate the difference between the spinning and non-spinning play states in a way that was similar to our Phantom slots.  After some experimentation, we arrived at a method that involved separating the music into a track with heavy percussion and a track with the rest of the instrumentation.  This way we could play them both simultaneously and fade the heavy percussion track in and out as the reels were spinning.  Here’s an example of the track separation:

Percussion Track

Instrumental Track

Sound

Battle Slots features hundreds of different creatures and spells that all needed to be represented in some way with sound.  Most of the creature sounds are a result of recording nearly everyone in the office and modifying them heavily in Cubase.  Here is an example of that transformation process:

Before Edits

After Edits

The spell effects were created by synching a combination of stock sound effects and synthesizers to a movie of the effect. Here’s an example:

I had a great experience working on Battle Slots.  It is definitely one of my favorite experiences I’ve had so far with making video game sounds and music.  I’m very proud of the work that myself and the rest of the team put into the project.  I hope people find its unique mix of game mechanics as addictive and compelling as I did.  As I was testing the sounds throughout the project I often found it hard to pull myself away.

Posted By: EmmaEFX