Revision - audio and music - Of Peaks and Tides Wiki

Overview

Audio is one of the few areas of Of Peaks and Tidesthat CyancookGames has discussed at length in its own words. The studio devoted its second development update, published in July 2026, entirely to sound effects, creature audio, and music, and the account it gave is unusually candid about what was not working and what remains unfinished. Almost everything on this page is stated design direction rather than tested behavior, because no public build has shipped with the reworked audio in place.

The Combat Audio Rework

CyancookGames describes its first pass at sound effects as deliberately plain and lightweight. It worked in a technical sense, but internal playtests exposed a gap: a boss fight the team was sweating through still did not deliver the impact it should. In the studio's own summary, hits lacked weight, combatlacked rhythm and punch, and fights looked intense without hitting as hard as they should. Internal feedback was blunt enough that the team rebuilt its approach.

The stated conclusion is that audio is not ambience. The studio treats it as a core part of how a player perceives the world, arguing that good sound design communicates weight, danger, speed, and pressure, and that in some situations it lets a player read the flow of a fight or sense a change in surroundings without ever looking at the interface. The counterweight is loudness: CyancookGames has said it does not want audio to become overwhelming or distracting, and that finding the balance between forceful feedback and a comfortable soundscape is something it is still refining.

Creature Audio by Size Class

The Unique Beastsare sorted into four size classes for audio purposes: small, medium, large, and a separate mythic tier. Each class carries different requirements for spatial presence, frequency balance, and overall sonic weight.

Class	Audio treatment
Small	Emphasis on agility and speed.
Medium	Sits between the agile and the heavy treatments.
Large	Heavier low frequencies and a stronger sense of presence.
Mythic	Built so players hear the creature before they see it. The studio calls this the hardest of the four and has said it has been a constant source of suffering for its audio designers.

For future mythic creatures the team has floated more detailed, part-level sound design: the force of massive wings pushing through the air, the low-frequency rumble of a colossal body in motion, and the scrape of a tail dragging across the ground. The intent is that these read as an approaching mass rather than as background effects.

Music and Instruments

Music has been in development alongside the rest of the game. CyancookGames says it has researched somewhere between forty and fifty lesser-known instruments and drawn on a wide range of references tied to ancient cultures and mythology, publishing a sheet of instrument concept art that includes frame drums, bone and reed flutes, ocarina-like vessel instruments, horns, and a small angular harp.

The studio is explicit that this is not historical reconstruction. Historical references seed some ideas while others come from reinterpretation and the team's own experimentation. The stated target is music rooted in ancient cultures but leaning fully into fantasy: recognisably Eastern-inspired tones and textures blended with sound design that feels less traditional and more unexpected, so that the score reads as mysterious, unfamiliar, and specific to the world.

Dynamic Soundscape

Both the environmental audio and the music system are being built to react rather than loop. CyancookGames lists the inputs it expects to influence what a player hears:

Time of day
Weather and the seasonal cycle
Region
Combat state
Enemy type
Player location
Certain gameplay mechanics, including celestial omens

The studio's stated aim is a soundscape that shifts and flows alongside the player and the world instead of sitting underneath it as static background. It has also acknowledged the production cost that implies, and describes more interactive and adaptive sound systems as something it hopes to explore as the audio foundation comes together.

Planned Directions

Several ideas are on record as things the team wants to try rather than as confirmed features:

Area	Stated intent
Footsteps	A player's carried weight may affect footstep sound; weather and surface moisture could subtly change footsteps and environmental audio.
Wind and echo	Wind speed, terrain, elevation, bodies of water, and environmental structures influencing how wind and echoes travel.
Physics-driven audio	Rolling objects, massive creatures crashing into water, destructible environments, and the changing sound of projectiles passing the player's ears, tied to the Physics System.
Weapons	More distinct weapon sounds derived from a weapon's shape and material.
Large-scale events	Boiling seas, floods, miasma, and other calamitiesmade to feel overwhelming sonically as well as visually.

Status

CyancookGames closed its July 2026 audio update by saying there is still a long way to go, and that building a world players can hear themselves inside remains one of its biggest goals. The same post referred to an upcoming playtest and invited feedback on the audio during it, which is the only public link between the audio work and the offline playtestspromised for 2026. No composer, audio director, or middleware has been named publicly, and no soundtrack release has been announced.

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