Qbeh-1

Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube is a PC puzzle game that focuses heavily on atmosphere. Players pick up blocks from the environment and place them on specific spots to build bridges and stairs and solve puzzles to progress through the levels.

I was responsible for all the audio in the game, music and sound effects, as well as some of its implementation. A full length video game with 36 levels over 6 different worlds, it is one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on, and to be able to fully realise its potential I moved to Finland, so I could work closely with the devteam.

The game was released on Steam on May 15th, 2014 – you can find it here.

This trailer shows off the core gameplay mechanics of picking up blocks and placing them, as well as some of the game’s trademark atmosphere, created in large part through the use of music and sound effects.

In order to give the game a unique sound, I made sure all of the sound used in the game came from my own recordings – every sound I used to create the sound effects and music was recorded by me. This meant that if I needed to find a sound effect for something – say, an effect for walking through water – I had to go out and find it. Finland is a very large country with lots of nature and very few people, and so I was able to fill the gameworld with the country’s strikingly serene natural soundscapes.

It also gave the soundtrack a unique spin. In addition to some instruments like guitar and ukulele, many of the samples I used to create the soundtrack came from recordings of things like wineglasses, kitchen appliances, water droplets, and other random things I found around the house, the office, or out in nature.

The full soundtrack contains 39 tracks for a total of over one and a half hour of music, all created with the use of homemade samples. Here’s what one reviewer said about it:

“The music is another key component, one which is perhaps the most important part of the game even if it is relatively simple. For the most part the music is a piano softly playing notes as you walk, with other instruments popping in and out of the score for good measure. It too creates a calming sensation, frequently causing me to focus so intently on the game that I forgot about the world around me. That’s a rarity for a game to accomplish, and the simplest way that the music can be described is that it’s very, very well made.”

– https://www.hookedgamers.com/pc/qbeh-1_the_atlas_cube/review/article-1264.html