The Lost Bear

Our starting point for The Lost Bear was a series of acoustic guitar compositions recorded by Studio Lead Daniel Robinson’s Granddad.
Odd Bug were passionate about using these recordings, but were unsure how they would work in-game. They fit well at the beginning and end of the experience, but were not quite appropriate for the more abstract design of a journey into the imagination of our protagonist. A young girl called Walnut.

We landed on the concept of slowing the recordings down to represent how time often moves slower for children. We used extreme time-stretching to slow the recordings to as long as three days in length, then picked sections of these and layered them with strings, percussion and acoustic instruments as well as slowed down animal sounds and vocalisations. We bookended the game with the original recordings and the result was an amazingly rich tonal score, interjected with moments of horror.

For the voice design we worked with voiceover artist Kathryn MacColl to create an improvised language based upon an Eastern-European dialect. Kath voiced both protagonist and antagonist, a conscious decision designed to represent the characters strengths and fears.

The Lost Bear was a unique project, not just because of its beautiful art style, but also technically this is a 2D platform game played in a Virtual Reality space. As such, the music implementation had to reflect this “game-within-a-game” concept. We designed a music system that would immerse the player; using music cues to attract attention and underscore moments in the gameplay within the 2D and 3D environments, including musical games and puzzles.