V.A Proxy

“V.A Proxy is a fast-paced parry-focused combat game with a massive dynamic megastructure to explore, it follows the story of three machines that seek freedom as they fall deeper into the guts of this world.”

~ V.A Proxy Steam Page

V.A Proxy by PyroLith is the first project I had (and have) the privilege of working on. I met my friend Khayyam, the composer and fellow sound designer after he walked into my class to get feedback from my instructor on some things he was working on for the game. He brought me onto the project in June of 2023, and since then I’ve been working on and off crafting the sonic palette of V.A Proxy.

Sound is fundamental to the game's lore & player experience; Without spoiling too much, Sen, the protagonist, has had his memory circuits forcibly wiped and is now exploring the enormous world around him, trying to piece together his life before. Music and sound are some of the only links he has to his past and are critical to unlocking new memories and new areas of the game.

There is a demo out on Steam & Khayyam that has released the demo soundtrack, but we’ve still got a long way to go on the audio front. We have a very active fanbase full of some of the most incredible art you’ve ever seen, so if you’d like to follow along join the Discord! Also, it probably goes without saying but, demo spoilers below!

There were a few community members who expressed interest in voicing one of the main characters, [REDACTED] (no secret lore spoilers here, think again, V.A Proxers! muahaha >:D ). So through them, we had the wonderful opportunity to gather audition tapes and add voice acting to V.A Proxy! There was a lot that went into designing this huge, god-like sonic visage and I had a ton of fun and learned throughout the whole process.

We had our actor, ItsKKing record a second take on top of the one we selected. Vocal doubling is often used to give a singer a fuller, more empowered presence. I thought we could apply something similar to the design of this character since it’s supposed to sound like this massive, omnipresent, thing.

Once we had our final recordings, I went in, aligned the performances, and then went to town manually glitching out different words by chopping them up and doing unspeakable acts with Ableton’s various warping algorithms. There was a lot of trial and error on which words stuttered and glitched the best; the goal was to create a broken VO while maintaining a decent level of legibility.

After that came the FX racks. Many, many FX racks. I used resonators, choruses, phasers, gates, grain delays wired up to random LFOs, weird EQs with modulating frequencies, more than one instance of OTT, a dash of VocalSynth 2 (and I mean a dash), reverse reverbs, reverbs from metallic containers, bit-crushers... I ended the whole thing by importing the layers into Pro Tools and mixing them with the Atmos renderer, which was fun to learn!

In short, it’s a bit ridiculous and probably unnecessary. But it was enjoyable just to try stuff out and iterate. I’ve been able to refine my design process a lot since thanks to this project, and it’s prepared me for much of the work I’ve done for AdHoc Studio.

UDEX Judgement is one of three starting weapons the player gets to choose from when they begin the game. It’s a really sick-ass giant katana, and when I started working, it was the only one of the three starting weapons available. There was a single temp sound in-game being used for every sword attack, and I was having trouble coming up with new things that hit the same notes as the temp sound (as is ever the case with temp stuff, go figure).

So I decided to just use it as my base; I took that sound and threw it into Ableton and made a convincing number of variations that didn’t sound as mono as the original. It was pretty simple: an EQ, a grain delay with a really short timer, and some fiddling with the clip warp markers.

For the heavy attacks, I took a different temp sound and melded it with the new one I had just come up with. After that, I added a bit of foley and some extra electrical elements to differentiate between the weapons charged vs. uncharged states. All in all, I was able to turn the original into something much more exciting!

“Upper Sewers” - Concept art generously provided by Ves

“Sen” - Concept art generously provided by DragonRoilZ