image promotional made By Hardien Verrechia
Demo Video Gameplay
Pitch of the game
Spindle Garden is a first-person organic toy-game experience where players care for and hybridize gorguis modular, plant like creatures within a living ecosystem. By nurturing, crossbreeding, and selling these strange hybrids, players shape their own garden world: an ever-evolving ecosystem at once familiar.
A project of collaboration and exploration
This project was developed over the course of six months as part of our final year at ICAN. Our team of six worked together to bring this unique world to life, each member contributing their own expertise and creativity. I had the privilege of being the sound designer on this project crafting the organic, hybrid soundscape that breathes alongside the garden itself.
A living ecosystem brought to life by sound
In Spindle Garden, the soundscape isn’t just an atmospheric layer it’s the very essence of the game’s world. Each rustle, hum, and echo breathes life into the garden and its strange gorguis, inviting the player to step into an organic, ever changing environment. Sound here is more than an accompaniment; it’s a dynamic, reactive system that mirrors the game’s hybrid and evolving nature.
Immersive and unsettling: the signature sound of Spindle Garden
The team set out to create a sonic world that balances wonder with a creeping unease. Inspired by the dark fairytale aesthetic of Coraline and the organic mystery of Pan’s Labyrinth, the game’s sound design is both familiar and deeply fantastic. It’s a place where soft, natural whispers blend with strange, evolving textures where every sound seems to carry a secret, hinting at something just out of reach
Screenshots in game of the garden overall
Screenshots in game of a new gorgui growing
Screenshots in game of a new grogui growing
Screenshots in game of the path that lead to the second zone
Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro (2006)
Little Nightmare, Tarsier Studios (2017)
Coraline , Henry Selick (2009)
Alice Madness Returns , Spicy Horse (2011)
Immersive and unsettling: the signature sound of Spindle Garden
The team set out to create a sonic world that balances wonder with a creeping unease. Inspired by the dark fairytale aesthetic of Coraline, the organic mystery of Pan’s Labyrinth, and the twisted, fantastical world of Alice: Madness Returns, the game’s sound design is both familiar and deeply mysterious. Equally, the haunting minimalism of Little Nightmares informed the approach—especially in how subtle, unsettling sounds can create an atmosphere of quiet dread and fascination. The result? A world where soft, natural whispers blend with strange, evolving textures—where every sound seems to carry a secret, hinting at something just out of reach.
Inspirations and intentions
Coraline was a primary source of inspiration, shaping the project’s intention to capture a childhood sense of curiosity tainted by something fantastical and slightly uncanny. The sound design strives to recreate that same duality: the comforting creak of a floorboard that somehow also feels ominous, or a melody that’s both delicate and haunting.
Equally influential was Pan’s Labyrinth—particularly its approach to crafting sounds that blur the line between the natural world and a living, breathing fairytale. The team was fascinated by how the film’s soundscape uses recordings of nature creaking wood, rustling leaves, animal-like groans to build a world that feels ancient and alive. This approach inspired the use of field recordings and found sounds in Spindle Garden, layered and processed to create voices that are both organic and mysterious.
Technical alchemy: FMOD and REAPER
To realize this vision, the sound design was anchored by a sophisticated technical pipeline. FMOD is at the core, managing a complex web of dynamic audio events and spatialized cues. Each gorgui has its own unique voice groans, organic crackles, unsettling ASMR-like murmurs all evolving in real time with the player’s interactions. FMOD’s states and parameters allow the sounds to shift fluidly, reflecting the life cycle of each agent.
REAPER served as the laboratory for crafting these textures. The team combined layers of natural recordings like creaking branches and underwater bubbles with digital manipulation techniques, such as granular synthesis and spectral stretching. The result: hybrid sounds that feel at once familiar and fantastical, echoing the garden’s surreal ecosystem.
Fmod project: Event of a gorgui named Spiky and all the transition of the states
Subtle musical experimentation
The music blends orchestral and experimental layers crafted with tools like the BBC Orchestral Library and Spitfire Labs and adds unexpected textures, like a bicycle chain sampled on a piano. Two main FMOD events structure this experience: one for zone transitions, spatializing the experience and immersing the player deeper into each garden area; and one for the garden’s progression, where each new mature gorgui adds more instruments. This system pushes the player towards a rich crescendo, an auditory apotheosis as their garden flourishes.
ASMR whispers of nature
Subtle ASMR-like layers nature’s quiet whispers, rustling leaves, water droplets are woven throughout the soundscape. These sounds don’t dominate; they flicker at the edge of perception, creating an intimacy that draws the player deeper into the garden’s fantastical rhythms.
Clarity and subtlety: the art of audio feedback
In a world driven by mutation and experimentation, audio feedback needed to be both intuitive and evocative. Each player action watering a plant, harvesting a gorgui, cutting a propagation link has its own distinct audio cue. These sounds are carefully placed in the mix to guide the player without overwhelming them, reinforcing the feeling of being immersed in a world that’s both familiar and unsettling.
A soundtrack that breathes with the player
The adaptive soundtrack grows alongside the garden. Built around dynamic musical stems, it evolves with the garden’s changing states richer, layered melodies as the ecosystem flourishes; sparse, haunting tones when things decay. The team’s musical influences, from Coraline’s eerie lullabies to Pan’s Labyrinth’s organic, mythic textures, Little Nightmares’ minimalism, and Alice: Madness Returns’ hybrid fantasy, guided this approach. The result is a musical world that feels as alive and unpredictable as the garden itself.
A soundscape alive with possibility
Ultimately, the sound design of Spindle Garden is a direct reflection of its world: a hybrid of the familiar and the fantastical, the comforting and the uncanny. By weaving together the refined textures of orchestral libraries, the eerie whispers of ASMR nature recordings, and the unexpected strangeness of found sounds, the game creates a soundscape that is as unique and ever evolving as the garden it brings to life.
Reaper project of the ambiance music of the zone 1
Fmod Event: Transition of the zone's ambiances
