Turbo Pudding

FernevaleDev diary

One song for the whole game

· The Turbo Pudding team · 5 min read

Daina, a girl with long dark hair and a red ribbon, stands barefoot in a white nightgown in the dream forest at night, among tall trees with flat round tufts of needles on bent branches, glowing orange mushrooms along a path of pale stones and a few white daisies, with a warm lit window high in a huge tree trunk on the left and a full moon with a faint hare on it shining between the branches

There isn’t a single audio file in Fernevale. Every note, every owl, every creaking board and every snore from the hatbox is made by your browser while you play. It’s Wednesday, so here is the dev diary: how one old song became the whole soundtrack, and how the characters talk without saying a word.

Opi’s song

Daina’s grandfather Opi used to sing her a song about a forest across the sea. It starts with the words “Aiz jūriņas,” “beyond the little sea,” and it has four lines of four bars each, in waltz time. The words are our own, written in the style of a Latvian daina, a short folk song. The singing is in Latvian, and only the English shows on screen. The first line goes: “Beyond the sea, the little sea, / a wood that no one planted.”

You hear it from Daina herself in the first chapter. At dusk in Ward Seven she sits down to draw her dream, and without quite deciding to, she starts to sing. “Opi’s song. I haven’t sung that since I was eleven.” The rest of the song is something she has to find.

Daina, a girl with two long dark braids and a pencil tucked behind her ear, sits on the edge of her iron bed in Ward Seven in a dark robe with a cape collar, eyes closed and lips pursed as she hums; the room is washed in pink and lilac dusk light, with brass knobs on the bed frame, a temperature chart hanging from the foot rail, a water jug on a side table, a bell pull with a tassel and a lamp on the night table behind her
Typed “point and click game with a lullaby”. She hums it herself.

Every other track is built from the same material: a flute sings the tune on the title screen, a singing saw takes it in the dream forest, and a music box plays one line when Daina remembers something.

A tune with no B in it

Here is the trick that holds it all together. The melody never touches the note B, so the chords underneath get to decide what it means. Put a B flat in the harmony, and the song sounds like home: Riga, family, a memory. Put a B natural there instead, and the very same notes sound like the forest, old and a little strange. One tune, two moods.

A band for every room

The sanatorium has no song at all, because nobody at Pine Hollow remembers it. By day it gets a polite waltz in F, a piano going oom-pah-pah and a clarinet that is a little too calm. In the second half, the clarinet slips in two notes that don’t belong to the key, an E flat and a D flat. That’s a worry the grown-ups don’t hear.

Dr Fell’s consulting room gets an organ figure that turns over and over like a barrel organ, with wood blocks and finger snaps keeping time, while his apparatus hums on one low note and crackles.

Daina, in a long gray-brown robe with a cape collar and two braids, stands surprised in Dr Fell’s consulting room beside his apparatus, a wooden cabinet with three brass knobs and a glowing violet glass tube on a stand; behind a desk with a green-shaded lamp, papers and a letter with a red seal sits Dr Fell, a bald man with gray side whiskers, glasses and a white coat, next to a white porcelain hare, with a tall sash window full of birch trees behind him and a green couch on the right
Search: “1911 sanatorium mystery game”. Even the apparatus hums.

The night of the escape is our favorite. Plucked strings, spoons and a banjo play on tiptoe over a tuba that is trying very hard to whisper. It’s swung, so the whole thing sneaks along with a waddle.

A puzzle you solve by ear

In the garden that night, two tawny owls sit in the pines. Win calls them the Night Committee. Nobody spells out the rule, but you can hear it. Daina puts it this way: “She asks, he answers. Like Omīte and Opi.”

Real tawny owls do exactly this. The female calls a sharp “ke-wick,” and the male answers with a long “hoo-hoo.” The famous “tu-whit, tu-whoo” is really the two of them together. Try it on the owls, and Daina has a comment ready: “That’s from a poem. Owls don’t read.”

Night in the Pine Hollow garden: two brown tawny owls with pale speckled chests sit side by side on a branch of a tall pine, under them Daina in a dark dress and cape stands beside a bonfire heap with a grinning stuffed guy on top, a glowing white hare peeks over a fence post, and Mr Hatch, an old gardener in a cap with a pipe and a lantern glow on his face, stands by his wooden shed with a smoking chimney, with a carved lantern glowing on the fence and a plant label reading Araucaria 1871
People also ask: “game where you talk to owls?” Mind which one.

Get it right, and Win Ashby’s window flies open. Her fanfare is a kazoo, and she shouts over the whole garden: “VOTES! FOR! WOMEN!”

Voices without words

Fernevale has no voice acting. While a line types out, the character murmurs: quick syllables with real vowel sounds, on a pitch of their own. A question climbs at the end, an exclamation comes out louder and quicker, and an ellipsis slows down and fades. The game draws a different mouth for each vowel, so the lips move with the sound.

Everyone has a habit. Daina sometimes lets out a short “hm” before a dry remark. Dr Fell gives a falling “hm-hm” when he’s thinking. Sister MacRae says “tsk.” Mrs Bunce, the highest and quickest voice, often starts with an “ooo.” Every one of Win’s lines ends going up, as if it were a slogan, which it usually is.

Ward Seven at night in cold blue light: Win Ashby, with a bonfire of red hair, round glasses and a long purple dress, stands on top of Daina’s bed with one fist raised high and a fierce glare, while Daina, in a dark dress with a cape collar and two braids, stands by the foot of the bed with her eyes wide and her mouth open; behind them a big fern in a clay pot and tall French doors, with small carved lanterns glowing in the garden beyond the glass
Searched “adventure game with a suffragette”. Volume: yes.

Built for a phone speaker

Plenty of people play on a phone, so the music is written for a small speaker. When Daina sings, a soft kokle, a Latvian plucked zither, doubles the tune, so the melody carries even when her voice gets lost. The singing saw and the wooden whistle never go below the D above middle C, because a phone speaker loses the bottom. The plucked strings are an old trick: a burst of noise sent around a short loop, a little softer each time, until it rings like a string.

A script renders every track and sound effect without playing it aloud and flags anything that clips or comes out silent.

Listen for yourself

The prologue and chapters 1–2 are free to play in your browser at fernevale.com. Turn the sound on. The full game, all seven chapters, is $9.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Fernevale page.

More about Fernevale