Valsonga

Valsong is a point and click adventure is set in a mystical nordic forest.

It was developed at Futuregames in Unity,  with 9 people over the course of 6 weeks.

About the Game

Valsonga is a student project that was developed over the course of 6 weeks in Unity at Futuregames in stockholm. We were 9 people: 4 designers and 5 artists.

The challenge given to us by representatives of Dice and King (alongside the school) was to develop a storydriven, singleplayer game that centered around inclusion.

The game is set in a nordic mythical forest. The player takes on the role of Tofft, a small forest gnome whoose job usually revolves around painting the leaves so that they are dressed for the season and caring for the inhabitants of the forest. After a hero has raged through the forest in his quest for greatness, honor and loot, it's up to Tofft to bring back balance to the forest.

Sound Design

During Valsonga, we were two sound designers and musicians - me and the immensly gifted Kevin Martinez. He had responsibility for music and VO while I handled all foley and its implementation (FMOD and Unity).

About 90% of the sound effects in Valsonga was done by me, with only some assets taken from existing sound libraries.

The overall sound design is soft and "sparkly" to add to that mystical feeling. I achieved this by having natural, authentic sounds of branches breaking, grass shaking and bushes being stirred for the movement and environment. I added some discrete cloth and leather movement to the character alongside the footstep sounds. To add that mystical feeling, I used chimes for the butterfly effect, as well as when Tofft performs magic.

Ambience

The main part of the game is set in a forest, with a hint of magic to it. In order to create the proper feel recorded an actual, nearby forest for background ambience, and then added nodes with bird chirps and insects in FMOD.

We also have areas in the game where you walk through caves. In these sections the ambience fades to a cave ambience. This also affects the footsteps that change into harder surface with some reverb added to them.

Product Owner - Agile and Scrum

During the project I took on the role of Product Owner.

This meant ensuring that both the team members' views as well as the stakeholders was held in mind when working towards the end result. The stakeholders in this instance were the representatives from King and Dice, along with our head teachers and head of education.

We used scrum, with one week long sprints. In total, the project was 6 sprints. Each week we had a friday review with the head teachers, and every two weeks we had a challenge review with the representatives from King and Dice.

During the project we worked on being truly agile. Every day we had a morning meeting, a daily sprint during which we always stood up to  ensure that we kept focus. We worked with retrospectives, backlog refinement and estimates.