About
DUSKOsound builds the entire audio identity of a project: sound design, original music, foley, and final mix for films, video games, and animation. One author, one coherent sound.
“His uniquely ‘artisanal’ approach sets DUSKO apart. He went old-school and hands-on, forging the lion’s share of our dark cosmic fantasy soundscape from SCRATCH… Never once did he lose sight of the vision, if anything, he sharpened it. ANY interactive studio or linear-media project would be blessed to have DUSKO at the helm of their audio production ship, a singular talent. Just know that you’ll have a fight on your hands for his services.”
Fallen, a dark cosmic fantasy action game in Unreal Engine 5, featured on IGN, created by Brooke Burgess. The sound effects alone run to 200 cues.
The full audio existence of the game: original score and an interactive music system, a complete sound-design and foley palette across 5 levels / 5 biomes, and the Audio Design Document and asset spreadsheet the build was implemented from. PapaCubec Games helped implement the sound effects in MetaSounds.
A hot water bottle as the main sweetener, neuro basses, knives on knives, knives on glass, crystal scraping ceramic, and a broom handle overloading a dynamic microphone. Lightning from a Penguin Grenade library, because BC does not get much of it. The choir layer is a tenor singing at a funeral in Christ Church Cathedral, with EastWest Hollywood Choirs under it.
Dry ice reacting with water inside a 55 gallon steel drum, recorded with an Organic Audio Cjossul, which is a hydrophone and a contact microphone. The pillars that rise and fall out of the lava are two cement blocks dragging against each other.
Throat singing, one of the signature sounds of Hell, performed by Boleslaw Rygiel, who later worked on Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga.
Cloth for the dash. The impact that tells you a parry landed is a Zippo lighter closing, and that same source runs through a number of other effects.
Astra reaches the Blackwood Tree and Metatron answers. The cutscene fades into Metatron_Loop_01 on a two beat fade, which is why the handover lands on the music instead of on the cut.
The cracking was recorded by freezing and thawing ice every night for a week. Kasper Michaels is the voice of God.
Brooke Burgess is the voice of Lucifer. The delivery note names the scene by its loudest line, Father Protect Me.
The lost souls of Hell stop Astra to tell her their stories. She hears the confession, then forgives, condemns or abandons them.
“To Forgive earns His favour. To Condemn brings strength. But abandonment..? That could change the very shape of damnation.”
Every attack got its own pass. These are the raw performances behind the moveset.
Lightning, her own dialogue, and the tenor recorded in the cathedral.
The same cathedral’s pipe organ under that singing, a throat singer, and a sawtooth bass synth.
Dry ice squealing on metal, and knives scraping on glass.
The first time Astra meets each one: the splash, the stinger and the scream, then the fight, through the first kill.
This is my first game built primarily on original source audio. The sonic identity is built from my own library of real-world recordings (Boom Library and Penguin Grenade used sparingly). Inspired by Ben Burtt’s legendary Star Wars preproduction, I gave myself a phase to experiment before designing anything: I recorded a tenor and a pipe organ in a cathedral, worked with Boleslaw Rygiel, a throat singer who performed on Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga, froze and thawed ice every night for a week to capture that first satisfying crack, and recorded dry ice reacting with metal and water inside a 55-gallon steel drum.
Captured with LOM (Uši, Electrouši, Priezor, Geofon), Organic Audio Cjossul, the SM57, and AKG P220.
Those recordings let the player character and every enemy boss carry their own layered audio source, a sonic fingerprint no other character in Fallen possesses.
Hot water bottles, a neuro bass, the choir layer again, and screaming. To make it sound like the player’s ears are ringing, a bowed crystal wine glass.
A lava hellscape, scored as classic horror. Bending discordant strings build the tension, then epic orchestral drums arrive for the combat.
Lava again, and built in layers. Two ambience loops horizontally resequence into each other at the lava bridge, and a third lava layer loops on top of both.
The Dark Mage, fought in two phases. The phase change is a horizontal resequence fired at five percent of the Mage’s phase one health.
Four rooms in a row: the Eyeball Cave, the Cavern, Metatron, then the Void. Four rooms, four beds, handed to each other on beat counts.
Its own cutscenes, its own ambience, and fourteen music cues.
Scored and designed end to end. Turn the sound on.
Level 5’s combat music, wired in the Level Blueprint. Every loop and transition is scheduled on one Quartz clock, each with its own fade in. To test it, I walked a corridor of trigger boxes, one per cue, and listened to every change.
For a palette that bridges sound design and music, I layered elements of the score (East West, Arturia, NI Kontakt, and my own recordings) directly into the stylized SFX. The result is a cohesive world where the music and the environment breathe together, under the masterful direction of Brooke Burgess. Voice cast: Lucy Stainsby as Astra, Kasper Michaels as the voice of God, and Brooke Burgess as the voice of Lucifer. The foundational layers of the enemies are voiced by Daniel Joseph.
It started at a piano I had not touched in eight years.
I had no idea who Brooke was or what he had accomplished. I just had a meeting with him, and I loved the concept. Epic Orchestral Horror. I can pull any genre out of my back pocket at a moment’s notice, but I really wanted to make sure this was as grand as I felt the concept required. So I entered an intensive research and development phase.
What I was after was the feeling Sealed Vessel has in Hollow Knight, mixed with proper horror. One of the driving things in that score is the leitmotif that keeps coming back. I wanted to imbue the protagonist of this narrative with the Holy Spirit, and that meant getting real human emotion through me, into the instrument, and then into the game’s overall compositions.
But it had been about eight years since I had put any serious practice into the piano. So I dusted the thing off and started from the basics. It was important to go over the rules again and see where I could break them, and to do that really intentionally.
Then I composed a piano sonata, and built the entire score around it.
That is the whole method. The point of the drilling was to get the structure into me subconsciously, by repeating it again and again with my hands, hearing it with my ears, seeing it with my eyes. Once it lives there, aspects of the leitmotif appear on their own in every composition that follows. The score is not a folder of tracks that happen to sit next to each other. It is one idea, learned by hand, surfacing in different rooms of the game.
Concept art by Fabrizio Bortolussi, who also signs as DarC. FALLEN is built by Papacubec and created by Brooke Burgess at Superboo Studios. Shared with credit. The artwork is theirs, the audio is mine.
Brooke Burgess created FALLEN and founded Superboo Studios. He started out as a producer and writer at Electronic Arts Canada, then made Broken Saints, among the first motion comics ever made. It won the Audience Award at the 2003 Sundance Online Film Festival and was later given a worldwide DVD release by 20th Century Fox.
He went on to collaborate with Guillermo del Toro on the motion comic tie-in for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and has since led narrative on Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast and written for Club Penguin.
FALLEN in the press: the official reveal trailer on IGN, and Brooke on funding the game, in GamesIndustry.biz.
PapaCubec Games is an independent game and cinematic studio in Tbilisi, Georgia, founded in 2021 by game designer Ilia Smirnov and Svetlana S. They built FALLEN in Unreal Engine 5: the game development, the cinematics and the characters.
They make cutscenes, trailers, characters and worlds for clients, including the animated Unreal Engine video for John Maus’s “I Hate Antichrist”, directed by Andrew Norman Wilson, and they develop their own games, Ghost Shadow and RushOut.
Fabrizio Bortolussi, who signs his work DarC, is a painter, sculptor and concept artist with more than two decades of horror, sci-fi and fantasy work in film and games. He painted the FALLEN concept art on this page.
He worked as a character artist at Production I.G in Tokyo, digitally sculpted the main alien for District 9 in its early development at Wingnut Films, and founded his own studio, OMNiriC Games.
Scott Blackwood was the producer who put us together. He joined EA Canada in 1994, produced the 007 games Agent Under Fire, Nightfire and Everything or Nothing, and was executive producer of skate. and skate 2 at EA Black Box.
He was Brooke’s mentor at EA, and after he retired he helped fund a FALLEN prototype. He passed away in 2023. We finished this project in his memory.
DUSKOsound builds the entire audio identity of a project: sound design, original music, foley, and final mix for films, video games, and animation. One author, one coherent sound.