Haven is a web-based visual novel-style multiplayer roleplaying game designed over the summer of 2024 for the University of Chicago. Haven sought to introduce incoming freshman to many of the new experiences and opportunities they would have as a student at the University of Chicago. This included compelling discussions and interactions with classmates, collaborative puzzle solving, educational minigames, managing a class schedule, and more! It was built from the ground up over the course of roughly 10 weeks, with the game rolling out gradually by chapters over three separate releases within that timeline. 

Because of our small team, I filled a couple of different niches throughout the course of the game. I was hired as one of three people on the Puzzle Design team, but as the game evolved, my job shifted into more of a general Game Designer position. Eventually it went through another evolution and it was decided that music and sound design were a larger component than expected, so I additionally took on this role. This page will detail my experience as a Composer and Sound Designer; please visit this page to view my work as a game and puzzle designer. 

A lot of the initial sound design work for this project was really setting the player into their environment. I am very inspired by tabletop actual-play productions, and those crisp sounds that follow narration always really pull me into the experience I'm being sold, so I felt that it was really important to be very active on that front. Because of our limited budget, I was required to stick to online-sourced free sounds, though I was able to get my hands on a microphone and a quiet space for recording my own foley, which I did on multiple occasions. 

Some days I spent creating freesound.org playlists, splicing together sounds on audacity, and editing files, and others I spent in a dark room (because the fluorescent lighting hummed in a way the microphone would pick up) sliding notebooks across tables, scribbling on pads of paper, and awkwardly setting up places for a microphone on an arm to be able to crisply capture the sound of a door latch as it closed and locked. 

As sound options began to be explored, I realized something missing from my soundscapes were the human voices of the students the player would be interacting with. And in a game about interacting with classmates and friends, that felt very important to incorporate into the sound.