Creator Spotlight : Antoine Vachon - Audio Director

Today, we chat with Antoine Vachon, audio director on Hell is Us!

Can you tell us about your journey as a sound designer and how you came to be working on Hell is Us as audio director?

I’ve been working in the video game industry for more than 15 years now. Most of that time has been spent working on a multitude of indie games, notably Mages of Mystralia, Rainbow Billy : The Curse of the Leviathan and the PostKnight games series. My roles have been diverse, mostly revolving about music composition, orchestration, sound design and helping my teams with any production issues they encounter. Working for small indie teams definitely tests your creativity and problem-solving skills!

When I joined Rogue Factor in 2022, I tried to bring some of that attitude to my new work environment. The Hell Is Us dev team is still relatively small for the kind of game we made, so the leadership team really values each team member taking ownership of their features and bringing a lot of their personal ideas in the game. It’s a wonderful thing to be a creator in that kind of context.

When we talk about player-plattering design philosophy, we often talk about game mechanics, UI/UX design, etc, and rarely about sound, though it’s clearly an important part of Hell is Us. What was your approach to the sound design and how does it fit with player-plattering?

That's something we had to take into consideration in many aspects of the game’s audio. Music design, for example, had to be constructed in a very particular way. Each music segment and track had to accompany the player as he makes discoveries, but never directly hinting or spoiling information that haven't been made available to the player yet. To accomplish that, we needed to create a highly adaptive system while avoiding the typical pavlovian reward stingers, the obvious danger tracks, etc.

We made every effort for the music to still feel engaging and evolutive and filled with mystery, we hope players will enjoy the results.

Hell is Us features an impressive voice cast, both in English and French. Can you tell us a little bit about the casting process and what goes behind the decision to cast certain actors?

We received an overwhelming amount of auditions in both languages! My co-voice director Mathieu Larivière and me ended up parsing through more than 500 selftapes for the English version alone. Local talent agencies have been incredibly helpful in making that process smooth, pointing us towards the very best talent in Montreal.

We were really fortunate to work with so many talented actors, such as Elias Toufexis (Deus Ex: Human Revolution), Nicole Law (Tales from the Loop), Caroline Dhavernas (Hannibal), and so many more. An actor like Vlasta Vrána, who plays Ernest Caddell, while not that well known by name by the public, has been working in the movie and game industry for more than 50 years, even appearing in early 1970s David Cronenberg movies! He absolutely floored us with his performance.

All the voice overs were recorded in-house at Rogue Factor’s offices with a mostly local cast; what’s the biggest advantage of that versus doing it remotely?

One of the things that made a difference for us while working directly with actors, locally, is seeing how passionate they were about the source material. We provided them with the game’s lore bible, and they wanted to know every