DESIGN | AUDIO
Above: The Witcher III expansion Blood and Wine includes bosses where combat mechanics are synchronised with the game’s music Left: The foley (top) and Pro Tools software (bottom) used to score Supermassive’s Until Dawn
“There has been a gradual awakening to the potential of audio as an important narrative tool – that it should be thought of throughout the process of building stories with games rather than just something that gets tacked on at the end,” says Walder. “We’ll start to see more games doing audio that goes beyond simply ‘X event triggers sound Y’ and being really creative to support and drive narrative. Lipka observes: “I see a great bias towards storytelling through audio. “Nowadays, more games tend to show increasingly complex and mature storylines, full of non-linearities and even real-life dramas. It’s clear that such an approach forces the industry to put more emphasis on sound as one of the main means of conveying narrative. “It’s a very exciting trend because as a byproduct it produces better tools for sound designers and draws experienced movie sound engineers or composers into games. Recent technical novelties unify movie and game mixing environments, making the transition less painful. Nowadays, it’s not so uncommon to see a great movie composer or sound designer’s name in a major triple-A game’s credits. “Hopefully in the future such trends will make the industry evolve and push games even further into new regions or directions.” ▪ DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
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AUDIO ANECDOTES BREAKING WIND Barney Pratt, Supermassive: For Until Dawn: Rush of Blood we put together a system of sounds for turbulence on the ears which varied depending on how fast you were travelling and the orientation of the head. The only thing that gave us the sharp, close, air-ripping sound of close-up wind turbulence was the sound of blowing directly onto a mic. Of course, this is something audio guys spend most of their careers trying desperately to avoid.
DANCING WITH DEATH Colin Walder, CD Projekt Red: Synchronising music with combat in Blood and Wine started with a conversation about what features we would like if anything was possible. We went away and came up with a way to do it by syncing AI attacks to the music. It took some convincing of the AI designers that it wasn’t going to break their combat design, but once we showed them they got really excited. In the end we didn’t get to take it as far as we would have liked due to time constraints, but we managed to implement it on a couple of the bosses – considering we started with an ‘impossible’ idea, that’s pretty cool.
BURIED IN YOUR WORK AS REAL AS IT GETS Ben Minto, DICE: Whilst I was still at Criterion, I was working on the pre-production for the audio for Black 2. As a player, you could interrogate a suspect and force your pistol into his mouth. We couldn’t find anything suitable in the library and faking it wasn’t working. So, I lost the coin toss – and a part of my tooth. We never found the sight that snapped off the airsoft pistol as it tore into the top of my mouth. We only did it the once and it sounded great, complete with my muffled cry and choking. A reminder that sometimes there is nothing quite like the ‘real’ sound.
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Martin Sahlin, Coldwood: Håkan [Dalsfelt, audio designer] had a bit of a (funny) scare during Unravel. He needed to record a zipper sound, and we don’t really have a proper studio. To find a silent place he decided to use the room where we store all the empty boxes, old hardware and other junk. He accidentally started a junk avalanche that made it impossible to open the door from inside. Luckily, his colleagues came to the rescue.
JULY 2016
24/06/2016 17:10