How I Created the Music and Sound Design for “Dead World Heroes”
My involvement with “Dead World Heroes” began when I came across a post by its creator, Hungarian independent developer Fehér Bálint.
I liked the project and contacted him because I wanted to support its development. The game already had its visual identity, characters and post-apocalyptic world, but it still needed music and a complete sound design.
What began with a message to the developer grew into responsibility for the game’s entire audio environment. I composed and produced its complete original score, created all of its sound effects and prepared the recorded character voices for use in the game.
Giving the Game Its Musical Identity
“Dead World Heroes” combines real-time strategy, action and tower-defense mechanics in a world overrun by zombies. The player has to assemble a team of survivors, manage limited resources and react quickly as the situation changes.
The score therefore had to do more than create a general feeling of danger. It needed to support the pace of the gameplay, build tension without exhausting the player and give the game a recognizable identity from its opening moments.
I composed the main theme, the opening music and the rest of the original score around that balance. The music moves between suspense, momentum and a sense of a world that has already fallen apart but is still worth fighting for.
For the main theme and opening sequence, I invited Oleksiy Sytnik to record live guitar. His performance added a physical, human edge to the production and helped distinguish the central themes from a purely electronic game soundtrack.
My music can be heard in the official Open Alpha trailer and remains part of the current version of the game.
Creating the Sound Design
Music establishes the emotional world, but the game also needed a functional audio language.
I created all of the sound effects used to bring its actions and environments to life. Every effect had to communicate something immediately: an attack, a threat, a mechanical action, a change in the environment or a response from the interface.
In a strategy game, sound design is part of the player’s information system. The effects need enough character to support the atmosphere, but they must also remain clear when music, dialogue and several actions are happening at once.
The work involved building individual sounds and then shaping them into a consistent system, so the game felt like one world rather than a collection of unrelated audio assets.
Preparing the Character Voices
The characters were voiced in English by an international cast. Reeko Brooks recorded several of the performances and also worked as the project’s voice director.
I received the voice recordings and prepared them for integration into the game. That included editing and processing the performances and creating effects appropriate to particular situations — for example, making a voice sound as though it were being transmitted over a radio.
The goal was to preserve the actors’ delivery while making each recording belong naturally inside the game’s environment.
From Independent Development to an International Audience
The developer publicly acknowledged my contribution while the game was still in production, writing that he had received sound effects and voices from Nevelskiy and Reeko. The game’s Open Alpha 1.0 became available on September 23, 2022.
IMDb now credits me in both the Music Department and Sound Department for “Dead World Heroes.”
The Android version, currently available as “Dead World Heroes: Zombie Rush” on Google Play, has surpassed 100,000 downloads.
Players also noticed the audio independently. One response to the official trailer specifically praised the soundtrack and added that the main title theme “really got me going.”
For me, “Dead World Heroes” demonstrates what complete game-audio production requires. I joined an existing visual and narrative world, developed its musical identity, created its sound effects and prepared its voices—turning several different layers of audio into one coherent experience.
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