Starfield – Ship Builder

With Starfield being one of my most anticipated games of all time, I definitely wanted to try my hand at designing sound for it. I thought the shipbuilding in particular would be a good opportunity to showcase some interactive UI.

My sound design process

• I approached this project from a game audio mindset by producing each sound effect individually as oneshots in FL Studio, and then later importing each of them into REAPER.
• The project contains two types of sounds – diegetic (ship parts) and less-diegetic (menu navigation). My aim was to incorporate the UI sounds into the game world, by creating the feeling that the player is controlling the shipbuilding process by interacting with a computer.
• I aimed to stick to the game’s industrial nasapunk aesthetic, by making the diegetic ship sounds very industrial, heavy, and impactful. These sounds consist of multiple layers – a deep sub, a reverberated high-end metal impact, a deeper low-end metal impact, resonating springs, a deep rumble, a mechanical glitch, and the reverberated sound of a shipping container being moved.
• My vision was for the Ship Builder to be located in a large industrial factory, but the player is in a meditative trance (depicted by the ambient music and drone), and mostly blocking out the sound of the industrial ambience.

My music production process

• The music is completely integrated in the ambience. I used an ambient space piano from Omnisphere, and messed around on my keyboard, playing (mostly) random notes that sounded consonant within the context of the ambience layer.

My editing and mixing process

• I wanted to add spatialization to certain sounds, but without extreme panning. Especially the physical sounds when grabbing, dropping, and attaching ship parts I wanted to be 3D.
• Interface sounds such as scrolling and clicking in menus should be quieter than the more diegetic sounds such as placing ship parts. I wanted the player to feel the impact of these large chunks being moved.
• The ambience needed to be present, since I really wanted to envelop the player in this thick atmosphere, but at the same time it shouldn’t be imposing enough to drive the player crazy if they spend more than 5 minutes at a time in the Ship Builder.