Augustin Carroll

“Evil dead” but from the tree’s perspective

In The Killing Tree, terrorize three teenagers as they go about their business in a cabin in the woods. Their fear grows your power, allowing you to grow roots into the cabin and haunt various objects, eventually killing them if you succeed. I originally signed on to do SFX, but ended up providing a lot of the game music and the menu music as well. This game was my first time using middleware in a real-life project, so developer Devin Miller helped me with a lot of the implementation.

Procedural music

One of the devs who wanted to try his hand at music created an FMOD event to play randomly chosen synth notes, but asked me to create some playful-spooky musical phrases that would fit with any of the notes that the synth could choose. I created the music in an FMOD event that randomly uses one of these phrases when needed:

I also created a menu music track, and some silly music for the radio, an object in the house that turns on when “haunted.”

Radio music:

Sound effects

This game was very SFX-heavy, including footsteps (on different materials), horror stings, character vocalizations, and lots of haunt animations with objects around the house. But my favorite was the root growing sound, made by twisting up some branches from my yard, sounds of my creaky floor, several layers of synth and noise drones, and a little bit of my own breathing:

You can learn middleware from making practice projects, but you never really know where your deficiencies are until you jump into something in real life made by a dev team. Since this was my first time doing that, there were a lot of things I suddenly realized I didn’t know how to do. I’d say 90% of the FMOD knowledge I used for this project was learned on the fly.

Play the game

Play the GameThe Killing Tree can be found on itch.io and downloaded for free: https://leftout.itch.io/the-killing-tree.