You may not immediately think that sound is one of the senses that are essential when cooking. Taste and smell are obvious, of course, but there’s also the saying that you eat with your eyes first. In a cooking video game like Venba, you’re reduced to the essential senses – there’s no way to taste, smell or touch the food on screen – only sight and sound remain. In situations like these, you realize how important the sounds in the kitchen are: the sizzling of garlic in oil or the sizzling of dumplings in the steam. A video game about cooking needs to use these sensory memories to entice the player.
Venba is described as a narrative cooking game revolving around an Indian family who immigrated to Canada from Tamil Nadu in the 80’s. You take on the role of Venba, a mother and wife who wants to use food to reconnect her family members to their heritage and in return restore lost family recipes. It’s part visual novel and part cooking game. All the ingredients come together to create a story that, according to Visai Games, is about “family, love, loss and more.”
During a preview that took place last week, Venba Game designer Ahbi gave the media a glimpse of the game’s storytelling and cooking gameplay elements, but also detailed how the studio created realistic sound for all of the in-game recipes. Ahbi said the entire team committed to cooking everything VenbaI have read the recipes several times. “It was a great reference for the art and the sound,” said Ahbi. He noted that Tamil cuisine is not always the food that comes to mind when you think of Indian food; North Indian cuisine is more common in North America.
“I was really looking forward to presenting it Venba, but it comes with a double edged sword as there is a lot of pressure to show this with a lot of authenticity and to get it right because people trust these recipes to be correct. If Venba As we found a wider audience, we felt that responsibility very much.”
The cooking rule – that team members should follow these recipes themselves – was key to ensuring everyone understood the taste, texture and, yes, sound of South Indian dishes. “It was important to us to capture the recipes accurately and give players the feeling of stepping into Tamil cuisine,” said Ahbi. “The sound design plays a very important role in this.”
This task was set Venba Sound designer Neha Patel, who not only cooked the meals but recorded the sound at every step. “It’s not necessarily that we wanted to make noise, but […] It was really difficult to capture those specific sounds and there aren’t many existing libraries,” Abhi said. “Neha felt that Foley was the only way to get it right.”
Ahbi showed the press how this worked, with side-by-side videos recording things like crackling and splashing oil alongside in-game clips of fried foods. The way it was recorded required almost no editing from Visai Games; The audio could be overlaid directly over the in-game footage “as if it was filmed for it,” Ahbi said.
Beyond the sounds of cooking, Ahbi described the efforts the team made to create the essential background of Tamil cuisine – particularly the music on the radio. He recalled that there was rarely a quiet moment in his family kitchen, with the radio or television often playing in the background. Visai Games added an in-game radio with a soundtrack that accompanies the different storytelling eras and borrows from the sounds of Tamil cinema from the same decade. “In fact, it’s even more specific,” Ahbi said. “It’s designed to sound like a certain composer’s song. The songs are homages to certain music directors that we all loved as kids. Depending on the level and period, the era will change with the music and song styling.” This includes a song by a music director named Devanesan Chokkalingam or Deva, a man who has composed music for hundreds of films for nearly 40 years. They planned to do a song inspired by his music and he said he would do it himself.
Venba The result was music that was recorded live, sung by various South Asian artists and composed by Alpha Something. “It’s pretty rare in games, but even rarer in indie games,” Ahbi said. “But to recreate these styles of music, we needed live instruments that were distinctive to different music directors.”