Underground Blossom News

Less than 3 days left and we’re excited to share that Underground Blossom runs smoothly on the Steam Deck! 🤩

If you have some 🔥 questions about the development process for Underground Blossom or anything else Rusty Lake-related, leave them in the comments below. Our final devlog will be a Q&A!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

[h3]Underground Blossom Devlog 2 - Sound and Music[/h3]


Hi everyone! 👋

We are back with a new devlog! Since the music and sound devlog we wrote for The Past Within was one of our most popular devlog to date, we are very excited to share more about this interesting process for Underground Blossom as well. From the start, we knew that Underground Blossom’s gameplay experience would depend heavily on its soundtrack and that we needed something beautiful (and different) to accompany you through Laura Vanderboom’s journey. Luckily we have a great team around us that was (and is) ready to help elevate the audio of our upcoming project to new heights.

Music

It was back in May this year (2023) when Victor Butzelaar invited us to a studio session at one of Amsterdam's most iconic music places (Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ). After composing the main theme song on the piano a few months before, Victor was now eager to record the complete soundtrack for Underground Blossom in an official studio - a first in the Rusty Lake series. He was accompanied by Sebastiaan van Halsema, a very experienced cello player, and Arjan van Asselt, who helped record all the input in the best quality possible. It was a magnificent experience for us to hear the piano and cello working together. It felt like we were attending our own Rusty Lake concert!

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That day Victor and his team recorded dozens of tracks for Underground Blossom and we couldn't wait to try them in-game. As expected, the recorded music fit the atmosphere of the game perfectly, so much so that almost all tracks ended up in the actual game. The combination of the piano and cello worked so well to enhance the (emotional) journey of Laura. Each station has its own vibe and feeling, all thanks to the diverse tracks created by Victor.

Fun note: the way the in-game music works is a bit different than our previous games (except for The Past Within), here some music is only triggered in the case of a (special) event. Only then a piano/cello theme will start to play.

Sound

After our first successful sound design collaboration for The Past Within, we couldn’t wait to work again with our amazing sound designers Jorick and Giliam from Driftwood Audio. The sound effects in our first co-op game truly elevated the experience and for Underground Blossom, we wanted to reach at least the same level of quality. This mixed in with the right (background) sound effects would be necessary to achieve the right atmosphere for a game that takes place mostly on metro station platforms. After months of hard work, we are happy to share that they delivered once again, and how! The game is filled with more than 240 unique sound effects and we are sure you will have fun with quite a few of them.

Voiceover and extra effects

There are many characters to meet in Underground Blossom, some familiar faces, but also quite a few new ones. Bob Rafferty, our favourite man of many voices, is back! He even whispers this time. Iris Muller, whom you might remember from The White Door, is returning to voice Laura again. Andreea Bosgan, our very own community manager, takes the role of Young Laura to profess her need for candy. And we have some special guests like Hugo Bonaparte and Mike Wijdenbosch for some new characters. Next to all these voices, we have Remco Mikkers who adds his trumpet solos to the choir - yet another amazing addition to the overall sounds of Underground Blossom.


At the moment of writing this we are still fine-tuning the audio of the game: adding/adjusting some final sound effects and voiceovers. It is always the final steps that make the game feel and sound perfect. We hope you enjoyed getting some insights on the music, sound and voiceovers that you can expect to experience very soon in the game. The release date is very close now.. we have to go… we hear a metro arriving...

Ps. Don’t forget to share your questions below for next week's Q&A session!

Picture this: The Lake Cigars, Rusty Lake Mental Health & Fishing, The theatre, Johnsson bird food, and your art! “What is that?” you might be asking. To put it simply, having your own Rusty Lake ad design poster in a Rusty Lake game. That’s right! The Lake is looking for a new poster ad to put into Underground Blossom, and it might just be one designed by you! During the rest of September (and as a warm-up to #laketober2023) We’re hosting an art contest with the theme: Rusty Lake Ad.

10 winners will be selected at the end of this month, and our favourite entry will be added to one of the metro stations of our upcoming game: Underground Blossom.

All winners will receive a metro ticket 🎟️ that comes with a free copy of the game on a platform of their choice. 👀

Looking for inspiration? Check out the shared visual example and the posters found in the Underground Blossom demo.

The specifics:

• Art should be 1080×1920
  
• When posting, make sure to use the hashtag #UBPoster both on social media and in #contest-submissions on Discord. You can also send your entry via email at contest [at] rustylake [dot] com using the hashtag in your subject line
  
• Winners will be selected at the end of the month
  
• And remember, the theme for this contest is “Rusty Lake Ad“
  

After sharing insights on the development of The Past Within, we are very excited to return with a fresh devlog for Underground Blossom #UBDevlog. Today let’s dive into the history of the project but first, we would like to share a list of what we are working on now (with only 3 weeks left):

• Finalising all the achievements: Every station will have its own secrets!
  
• Our amazing group of translators are finishing the translations: the game will be available in more than 21+ languages!
  
• We are adding the last sound effects and music: Stay tuned for more on that in the next devlog!
  
• Optimising the game performance: We don’t want you to experience any lag when a new train arrives.
  
• Adjusting the game based on all the feedback we received at Gamescom: Thank you to everyone who came by our booth!
  
• And most importantly: testing, testing, testing to make sure the stations are bug-free.
  

These upcoming weeks will be crazy busy for us, but we are doing everything we can to ensure this train will arrive on the 27th on both PC and Mobile. A small reminder that a ticket to enter the train will cost around 4,99 $ / 4,99 € on Steam (with a special release discount during the first week)!

One of the first sketches of a station in Underground Blossom

For this devlog we want to dive a bit into the history of this special project. We’ve already brainstormed about this concept for quite some years. Having a train station is an interesting location: new trains come by, new people arrive and, in a way, taking a train to the next station symbolizes a new chapter in someone’s life. Laura has been one of the main characters throughout the Rusty Lake series and since we have been quite secretive about big parts of her life, we thought matching this concept with Laura was a perfect fit.

We only had to wait for the right moment to start working on the first prototype.

First puzzle prototypes!

These screenshots are from back around the time we started working on The Past Within. For quite some time we worked simultaneously on these two projects. If we got stuck on one project, we could continue with the other. With The Past Within we faced a lot of struggles to create our first co-op experience (feel free to check our previous devlogs). But also while the structure for Underground Blossom was laid out very quickly, telling Laura’s life throughout different stations was not as easy as we thought. So being able to switch between the projects in the beginning was very helpful for us in shaping both projects.

However, we soon realised that focusing on multiple projects at the same time is very difficult, especially with a project like The Past Within, where a lot more people are involved. Thus we decided to go for – some might argue- the riskier route, and focus on finalising The Past Within first. Luckily this decision had some benefits for Underground Blossom as well. The Past Within got us to step up our game with both the sound design (Jorick and Giliam from Driftwood Audio were excited to join) and music (Victor Butzelaar rented a studio this time). Since people enjoyed these improvements so much from The Past Within, we carried this level of attention to detail into the development of Underground Blossom.

After doing as many playtest sessions as we could, we also discovered that something was missing in the form of content. As a result, more stations/levels were added and the game became somewhat bigger than we initially planned. All in all, it was nice for this project to lay on the shelf for a while so it could blossom in its own way.

The project needed time to blossom as well

This leads us to right now, the present, hardly able to believe that we are almost there again: a new release. And, luckily, within a year of our previous release. It means a lot that we can keep sharing these experiences with you all and we hope you have a bit more patience till this new journey arrives.

Next week we will be back with some special behind-the-scenes material from our beloved composers Victor Butzelaar and Sebastiaan van Halsema and our amazing sound designers Jorick and Gilliam from Driftwood Audio.

Also, feel free to share some questions/ curiosities you might have regarding our project in the comments because the third and final devlog for Underground Blossom will be a Q&A!

Thank you for reading and your continued support,

Rusty Lake

Ps. Make sure to wishlist and follow Underground Blossom on Steam:



https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

This is your metro conductor speaking 📣💥
The Underground Blossom metro will reach Release Station in 3 weeks! 🚇 🌸

✨ Wishlist now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

Ps. Check out our social media @rustylakecom to participate in a contest to win a metro ticket 🎟️