Mouthwashing News

[h2]Greetings, our most valuable customer, %Insert_Name%![/h2]

Bogged down by your soul-crushingly boring 9-to-5? Family and kids are too much responsibility? Want to fly away from earthly troubles and worries?

Experience the thrill of space travel by joining one of our delivery crews, and explore the cosmic horizons! Find your true calling, learn new skills, and become one of the hard-working Ponies!

This time, you’ll be lucky enough to board the %TULPAR%. The most reliable (over %90% cycles in!) and safest ship (no more than %Undefined_Value% reported incidents!) with an already fully complete crew:

• Curly – a masterful captain,
  
• Jimmy – a trustworthy co-pilot,
  
• Swansea – an experienced mechanic,
  
• Anya – a top-tier nurse,
  
• Daisuke – a helpful intern.

What are you waiting for? Become a space courier now to connect people's hearts by delivering packages across planets – only with Pony Express.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Provided by Pony Express.

[h3]Mouthwashing is finally reaching even the farthest corners of the Galaxy![/h3]

A new explosive flavor that you have never tasted before! An exciting and refreshing nightmare voyage through the stars. What will happen to you and your crewmates? Surely, this haul will be the one to remember!

Want to know more? Head out to the Critical Reflex Discord server to meet fellow fresh-breath-loving people, share your thoughts and takes (mind the spoilers!), and hear from the Mouthwashing manufacturer, Wrong Organ (trade secrets not included).
We will continue to share more about the production process in future posts, host a QnA, and, of course, support the game going forward. See you in the next one!


This product is provided, sponsored, and endorsed by:
Wrong Organ, Critical Reflex, and the Dragonbreath Brand.

[h2]Hello again![/h2]

In this Developer Diary, we wanted to go over the audio design in Mouthwashing. Since so much of the game's setting and atmosphere is essential for the game, getting the audio right has always been one of our main goals. Here’s a look at our thought process behind using audio to enhance the narrative and gameplay, the inspirations we took, and our workflow throughout development.
Audio for us was split into addressing two main areas of the game: The ambience present in any given scene (so SFX and music), and keeping the pacing of the game as a whole feeling good.

[h3]Ambience: [/h3]
When it comes to the ambience of the game, we rarely wanted to use the audio to tell the story directly. Our mentality was instead to use it to assist the emotional tone of a segment, whether that be a cutscene or gameplay. We didn’t set out to create X number of tracks for the game’s OST for example and fit them where we felt was best. Every piece of music was made because a scene needed it. Martin, our audio designer, created all the audio for a scene as he saw fit. Then, if everyone felt it sounded good and fit the moment, we kept it. If not, we either iterated on it, or it was scrapped and something else was made in its place.

We recorded almost all sounds using the Zoom H1N recorder, except for larger-than-life effects like explosions, which were mixed using sound libraries and synthesized sounds. To achieve the late 90’s and early 2000’s horror game feel we used sound libraries popular at the time to to honor our inspirations.

Martin's recording set up

Throughout the entire game, a major inspiration for our audio was the 2022 indie horror film Skinamarink. Our aesthetic from the beginning of development has always skewed towards low fidelity, pixel-art but make it grungy. This same sentiment was applied to our audio. Throughout the game (except for very few silent scenes) there’s an audible cassette tape hum and noise floor underlying every chapter. This was done to make the environment feel gritty and grimy, and helps blend the sounds in the game together.

Another big inspo for us was Twin Peaks, so much so that we used often used the phrase “Twin Peaks in Space” as a shorthand way to describe Mouthwashing. The game has evolved a lot since then, but Twin Peaks has remained one of our biggest inspirations in our approach to music. One of the biggest examples we can talk about was our main theme. We wanted it to feel like a mix of Twin Peaks, A&W Lana Del Rey, and The Pure and the Damned from the movie Good Time. Mouthwashing’s main theme is meant as a mood piece, a calm before the storm type of song, hinting at what you’ll experience before you’ve begun playing.



[h3]Pacing:[/h3]
Let’s say we’re making audio for a level in Mouthwashing. Our workflow has been to build up a “chapter” of a game in steps: A gameplay pass, an art pass, and lastly an audio pass. When Martin begins working on the audio, he has free range for that chapter to experiment, sometimes leading to unorthodox choices in terms of sound and music. This experimentation phase was only made possible because the game takes place in a small enclosed environment, meaning we have lots of room to add details as the groundwork has already been laid out.

When playing through certain scenes in the game, we definitely expect some people to question why the tone of the music is so different from the scene itself. It can at times be jarring to see what’s playing out narratively, while the music is causing some tonal friction in the background. Creating this contrast between a scene and the audio was one of the ways we tried to keep the pacing of the game fresh. To us, this mismatch creates tension and tries to make the player feel uneasy and unsure what to expect next.

[h3]SFX Breakdown:[/h3]
The creation of the footstep audio is a great and non spoilery example. You’ll be hearing it a lot in game, so we wanted it to sound good. We started with the basics—a shoe hitting a surface—and then layer in secondary sounds like shoelaces, fabric movement, or even a jacket rustling. We make around 15 variations for each sound, then create three separate tracks that get randomly overlaid in the game.

These details may seem minor, but they make the game world feel more real and immersive. We didn’t want something as constant and prominent as footsteps to feel static or repetitive, especially in a game where atmosphere is everything.

We’ve also paid close attention to the ambience of the ship itself as you’ll be spending the majority of your time navigating the narrow corridors of the shipwrecked Tulpar. A dynamic ambience system was put into place, adapting to the timeline of the game, how broken the ship is and what systems still function. This serves two purposes: enhancing the atmosphere of the ship and notifying the player what part of the timeline you’re currently playing.

[h3]That’s all we can say for now. [/h3]
There’s definitely a lot more we’d like to elaborate on the subject, but we’ll save that for post release, which is next week!

Don’t forget to ask questions if you have them for our upcoming Q&A post!

Thanks for reading,
Wrong Organ

[h3]Hey everyone!
[/h3]

This is our first in a series of developer ramblings we’ll be putting out leading up to the release of Mouthwashing. We wanted to give some insight into our thoughts and processes we’ve used throughout making this game. We’ll also be throwing in some concept art, work-in-progress images, and other visuals relating to development throughout these entries.

With our previous title, How Fish is Made, we were working as a smaller team on an incredibly tight turnaround schedule. A lot of the choices made in the design of the game were based on trying to find interesting ways around time and experience limitations within the team. For example, sardines work thematically as creatures representing a perceived lack of individuality, but they’re also just very simple to animate. Their floating eyes that just crunch up to create a blinking effect was inspired by Spyro the Dragon. We wanted the hand painted textures to evoke if Crash Bandicoot went to Silent Hill.



Getting the player to care about their own choice in How Fish is Made was central to the experience, but to really underline that you also ideally felt for all the other fish in the same situation. The fish NPCs had to come across as larger than life characters without being given much unique visual characteristics or even names.

The base model for each fish was the same, with a handful of texture variations and size adjustment available to add visual character. We found it important to make sure each fish was impactful as well as entertaining and memorable as characters without the script getting overwrought and bloated. Working within these constraints definitely helped establish storytelling devices that would eventually bleed over into our next game.

*Early screenshot of How Fish is Made

How Fish is Made definitely explored a more esoteric side of storytelling and leaned heavily on vibes and themes. For our next game we wanted to try a more direct narrative structure, while still keeping things in our strange wheelhouse with some out of the box techniques. We would still be working within a small budget of resources, time and experience. Limited animations, character models and sounds. The game would be longer, feature human characters and a more direct story structure but we would still need to get creative with the design of the game to be able to execute on the vision. With a few more developers added to our ranks, we began work on what would become Mouthwashing.

*Concept art of Anya and Swansea

A few key aspects were present very early on in the central ideas of the game. A sunset in space. Retro futurism. Isolation. Non-linearity. Some of our early influences were Twin Peaks, MOTHERED, Skinamarink and Sunshine. We focused on contrasts, a ship that looks like a kitschy 70s interior design magazine within the crew quarters but the connecting hallways are uncomfortably mechanical, akin to a submarine.

The first character conceived was Captain Curly, his mangled state a contrast to the relatively regular looking rest of the cast. The visual design of the Tulpar crew are all loosely based on popular horror media characters. Some of these influences people have already identified, and will probably continue to when the full game is released. For instance, Daisuke's look is based off of Ryosuke Kawashima from the film Kairo. You’ll never believe it, but Anya is in fact heavily inspired by Shelley Duvall’s Wendy from The Shining.

*Early Daisuke Character Model, before deciding on a slightly less cartoony painting style.

In future posts, we’ll go into more detail about our process for making art assets for the game, how we record and create our audio, as well some other stuff like the tail end of development as we head towards launch.

We'll also be doing a Q&A post during this series, so please feel free to leave some questions on any of the posts!

Thanks for reading,
Wrong Organ

In the space freighter industry, there’s a saying:
“Hope to die, or for goodness sake, pray that everyone else did.”

What is the fate of Tulpar's crew of five? Shrouded in perpetual sunset, the crew find themselves stranded in the empty reaches of space. Food rations are running low, power is running out. Two things remain out in the desolate void; each other — and the endless waiting. And waiting. And waiting...

But unlike the Tulpar crew, you’ll know exactly when your wait will end after watching this trailer:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
What exactly went wrong? Who lunged the axe into the pilot’s chair? What's Captain Curly's secret? Got answers? Go over to the Critical Reflex server on Discord, don’t forget to get the Tulpar crew role and gain access to the #mouthwashing channel. There, you can obsess over every frame from the trailer and share your theories on what exactly happened on Tulpar.
And while you’re waiting, take on another blue-collar job. This time, you will be locked in between two unnamed lands, looking over an endless train. Go through the maintenance routine, make a new friend, and TRY TO SURVIVE.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2580020/THRESHOLD/

Over and out,
Wrong Organ and Critical Reflex.