Sounds of Dark Frontiers — Interview with Lead Sound Engineer

6 min readFeb 22, 2022

We’re back with another interesting update on the Dark Frontiers development! This time let’s take a deep dive into the soundscape of the game. Let’s sit down with our Lead Sound Engineer, Wade Fyfe, to talk about how we’re building the elaborate sound universe of Dark Frontiers from scratch!

Tell us about your journey as a sound engineer?

Wade: I’ve been playing with sound and music for as long as I can remember. I was in bands through high school and helped organize music festivals through college so besides being a musician myself it’s really always been around me.

Out of passion a couple years back my girlfriend and I started collecting crusty vintage audio gear like tape machines, synthesizers, hardware compressors and old effect units to experiment with in our own time, theres something about an old faulty piece of audio junk that just slaps different.

Making a bunch of happy accidents and turning it into something emotive and meaningful is really how I fell in love with sound design though. For example, we recently had an idea to intensely shake an old rusty birdcage full of scrap metal at one of our microphones and send the signal through some old tape machines and reverb effects.

It sounds insane… I don’t know where in Dark Frontiers we’re gonna place it yet but I know it’s gotta get in there somehow! 😂 Keep your ears peeled!

What is so important about a game's soundtrack?

Wade: I would love the player to be fully emerged and emotionally engaged within the virtual world they are participating in and I know that music is a great way to bridge deeply into the player's mind.

There is a theme and overall energy we would like to portray in the Dark Frontiers universe and the soundtrack and audio helps us solidify this feeling.

We have a saying around here at the studio.… ‘there is no louder weapon of emotional manipulation than the sound itself’.

What’s your method, how you come up with sounds?

Wade: So in the early stages, before we had not even put any microphones on. We spent a lot of time conceptualizing how we thought the DF landscape and environment needed to be portrayed.

Firstly we figured we wanted a somewhat realism feel, however there isn’t any sound on the moon and a muted game might just not cut it.

So Dark Frontiers being the space-horror-themed adventure that it is, we knew we had to re-create a fabricated semi-realism world blended in with horror sci-fi characterises to match the aesthetic.

After conceptualisation, the process is pretty straightforward. We had a look at all the items and surface materials in the game. Sand, stone, metal, crystal, concrete, wood, glass and many more.

We went out and sourced physical materials that we felt best matched that of the DF landscape and threw them all into the recording studio. We then set off to find the perfect pair of boots that most accurately captured the weight and density of how we believe the footsteps are portrayed in the game. This sort of process goes for a lot of the fundamental sound effects like shooting impacts or punching an alien in the bleeding heart. It really is a strange and fun process of observation, imagination and thoughtful creation… Or let’s just say I spend a lot of time rolling around in the dirt with shoes on my hands…

Regarding the secondary sound effects like the weapons, vehicles, aliens and NPCS. It’s really a process of pushing our creativity and then going through a bunch of trial and error till we get where we wanna be.

The aliens and robots are created by sending our own vocals through sound effect units like vocoders and modular synths as well as layering multiple voices on top of each other till we get the desired sound. However, there are multiple species of aliens and we would like them to all have their own sound and lingo — to create a more diverse universe.

Weapons we have created by recording actual gunshots of a 9mm, multiple assault rifles and a pump-action shotgun. We then blend them together with ‘pew-pew’ sounds we’ve created on our synthesizers. Mainly a Moog M32 and our beloved Roland JX3P! But there are loads of fun techniques to creating sci-fi sounds which I’m sure we will share as the process goes along.

Any surprises?

Wade: Like jump scares? Oh, there will be many…

A lot of community members have complained that they don’t like the blaster sound, will you come up with something better?

Wade: Haha! :D I did read a comment about that actually!

So the way the community is perceiving the game at the moment really is a sneak peek of early-stage development, obviously, the graphics get developed first and then we are able to create sounds to the visuals and animations.

This process, in result leaves the audio development a few steps behind the visuals.

So what’s common practice is to patch in placeholder sounds so that the developers can build the game with at least some audio attached while the sound design team gets to work creating and refining the final sounds for the game which will then be patched in at a later stage. It’s a bit of a building block and ‘improve-upon’ sorta method.

I guess the whole game in itself is a work of art, it will develop and evolve as we give more of ourselves to it.

How much of the sound will change from what you hear in the pre-alpha?

The sounds in pre-alpha gameplay will be much closer to the finished result than it is now, however, as we notice room for improvement the sounds in the game will continuously be worked on and improved until the main release.

We really do want to take the time to create an absolutely mind-mending and all-encompassing virtual experience to shake ya bones!

Make sure to follow Wade on Instagram @Kepler_Wun and keep posted for our next sound update! 🔥🚀

About Dark Frontiers

“Dark Frontiers” is the newest, gamified space realm governed by a Gamestarter produced DAO. As NFT standards and values are shifting towards promoting use-cases, Dark Frontiers’ goal is to drive mainstream adoption by enhancing the usability of NFTs through staking, item ownership, and the creation of real-world value through in-game items.

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