No Water in Hell
Standalone long-term Unity Published Project
No Water in Hell is a 2D action-adventure roguelike game in which players run through hell and spray down demons with a firehose.
Not even Hell Will keep You Down.
Players fight through multiplayer floors of hell, inspired by Dante’s Inferno with cartoon/arcade spins on existing ideas. A wide range of items, weapons, music, levels, and enemies await players bold enough to take on this roguelike experience, available on Steam, June 2022.
OST: “Hell Froze Over”, Track #5
OST: “Demise in the Underworld”, Track #6
OST: “Hell Spawn”, Track #7
Sound Design & Music
To help players buy into the aesthetic of Hell we wished to portray, we agreed our game needed music which represented the peril of both Hell and arcade/roguelikes alike. We looked through a variety of other games, but ultimately got inspiration for our music from three existing roguelikes: Crypt of the Necrodancer, Binding of Isaac, and Enter the Gungeon. All of which use floor systems with loopable music to create tension and build onto an existing aesthetic.
I used an existing chord structure from Binding of Isaac’s “Repentant” which used a key signature I recycled into the floor themes in No Water in Hell: E minor, B major, A minor, B major. I then went on to extend this chord progression to extend the idea of tension into a longer-lasting one with higher stakes. It also allowed for verses, solos, and riffs to be established as larger ideas as opposed to the smaller ones present in Binding of Isaac.
For each version of a given track produced, I would save my progress and rename the file every 3 hours of development to track my progress and compare iteratively across versions. Some examples of this are on the left.
Beyond the floor themes, I also composed music for boss fights, a shop, hub, title, credits, and miniboss theme as well. All of these tracks were designed to be looped endlessly and timed at approximately 155 BPM—roughly 25% faster than typical party music meant to increase the human heartbeat. A higher BPM would lead to a higher heartbeat if executed effectively, and in turn cause stress.