- Main Play
Players will take on the role of a small hamster who likes to explore and collect interesting sounds, and will be guided by sound elements to break through and solve puzzles. Before the start of each level, the player will listen to a piece of audio and then enter the level room, where each object in the room will emit a unique, representative sound, and the player needs to choose by looking for and approaching the object, and carefully distinguishing whether the object’s sound is the same as or similar to the audio that the player heard before the start of the level. Players will receive a sound clue fragment representing the object when they complete their selection, but move on to the next level regardless of whether that selection was made correctly or not. Once the clue fragments have been collected from all the rooms, the player will need to complete a sound puzzle to manually synthesise the pieces together to arrive at the final sound design audio.
- Difficulty Setting
At the beginning of the game, the audio the player hears may be exactly the same as the correct object sound, and may be about 5 seconds long. However, as the game progresses in difficulty, the audio the player hears will become shorter and shorter, and may be at least 1 second long; the audio the player hears may also be the correct object sound that has been processed in a variety of ways, such as adjusting the equalisation, adding reverberation, and being partially distorted or intermittent. On the highest difficulty, the audio the player hears may only have a small resemblance to the real object sound. The player needs to struggle to distinguish and find the correct object while resisting these interferences.
- Endings
Since as soon as the player chooses an object to end in the next level, the player only learns if they made the right choice after synthesising the sound clue fragments. Different choices lead to different endings. For example, if the player chooses the correct object in all five rooms, the final synthesised sound will be a complete, pleasing design, whereas comparatively, the more wrong choices the player makes, the weirder or harsher the final synthesised sound will be. At the same time, even if the same wrong object is chosen, a wrong choice in the first room and a wrong choice in the fifth room will result in a different synthesised sound, which will stimulate the player to replay the game in order to collect all the endings.
- Mini-game
Among the multiple objects in the room, there may be special objects set up that the player will randomly get some special effects after selecting them, such as the next room can only be played in darkness, or the audio heard in the next room will be very muffled. The player can undo this by choosing to play some sound-related mini-games. Alternatively, the player can choose to play a mini-game to revive the game after selecting a special object that will lead to the end of the game.
- Sound Design
According to our initial idea, the game is a creative game guided by sound elements, and the player can complete the final sound design by their own choices, thus leaving a lot of room for sound design. Firstly, in our conception, the game will not have text-based instructions, but rather a voice-over to tell the player how it needs to be operated and what needs to be done. The voice style of the narrator may be designed according to the overall style of the game and specific different levels. Secondly, how to design sounds exclusive to each object and how to process the audio that the player will hear must also be taken into consideration. Finally, in order to attract players to replay the game repeatedly, the game will have several different endings, how the sound material of each level can be combined to form the final sound design audio is another design focus. In the coming weeks, we will make various attempts to try to present the desired effect.
