Above is my favorite scene of the game from a sound design perspective. One challenge about this scene was that “powering up the generators” takes goes on for several minutes, and the player needs to have a feeling of increasing energy building up over the entire scene. I used FMOD to create layers of looping sound triggered by in game events that turned on new layers as the player turned on each generator.
Another challenge was that the sound both needed to stand out, but also not be annoying as this was already a sonically dense part of the game. I choose to focus on low frequencies first, and add higher frequencies via pitch and a series of low pass filters opening up as the sound became more prominent ( as more generators turned on. )
I also did the sound for the robots (note their sad little death sound, I love that)! I used a bit of vocoding for that layered with some synth sounds and formant filtering. Also the UI on top of the screen which keeps powering up was something I designed. Using frequencies rising to increase higher levels of reward is a bit of classic in game audio / sound design, and that’s for a reason : it works!