So last week, I took myself and the trusty 633 up to the cathedral at 7am to capture some ambience for the game. I went so early in the morning so as to avoid capturing as much human sounds as possible. I decided that a good starting point to begin constructing the ambience of the grand church in Taphobos was to actually record the sound of a church, then begin experimenting with that source material. I contacted the cathedral with the request and they were more than happy to let me record in the space, offering me wednesday as the quieter day of the week.

My equipment setup was the 633 and the Rode NT4 stereo X/Y mic, which i’ve used a number of times before to great effect. I was recording at 96k to SD, and I monitored on a pair of KRK headphones.

The sound of the space was, well, not what I was expecting. I’m not sure exactly what it was I was expecting – but it wasn’t what I captured. Sitting on the dusty floor in the middle of the main hall, I realized that the main sound source was actually the central heating and numerous radiators around the church. They produced a low hum, which was accentuated by the reverb of the space. The sound I captured was mainly this – the low rumble of the heating. I was disappointed to find the 633’s pre-amps actually created a vast amount of noise – moreso that i’d experienced using it before. This was largely due to the fact I had the gain running very hot – as the space was technically very quiet, I had to crank the gain up to capture the subtleties and nuances of the space. This resulted in the large amount of noise and also capturing arbitrary sounds – like the traffic outside and footsteps – much clearer that i’d have hoped. I felt this was a bit of a shame – as i’d been sold the idea that the S/N ratio was very good on the 633. Perhaps I used a bad mic. I’m not sure.

The sound I captured was usable though. I’ll roll off the top end and use the base hum as a building block to layer other sounds into, creating a multi-layered environment sound. I blogged about the recording on my 100 hours blog – you can read the post here.

Below are a selection of the raw recordings – these are straight from the 633, no processing or editing done (other than slicing up the clips to highlight interesting events).

(LO1)

So Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is another game that instantly sprang to mind when James told me about Taphobos. Amnesia was developed by The Chinese Room, the incredible company behind Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and more. The studio is known for it’s incredible composition accompaniment, by composer Jessica Curry, who I was lucky enough to interview for my dissertation.

The sound design on Amnesia was done largely by Samuel Justice, an English sound designer and co-founder of SweetJustice sound. He has worked on numerous games, such as the Battlefield series (whilst he was at EA DICE in Sweden), Dear Esther, Batman: Arkham Origins, SOMA, COD: Advanced Warfare, and many more. His work is fantastic, sonically brilliant and uses many interesting techniques to great effect. I’m particularly a fan of his work on SOMA – and I may well explore the sound of this game in a separate post, as it is definitely relevant to Taphobos.

The sound of Amnesia is very specific. It is almost heavy, thick and dense in many places. From what I understand, Justice worked on the sound single-handedly – and I’m also aware the game is renowned for the extremely low budget that the sound was created with, same for the music. This implication meant that Justice had to innovate in many areas to maintain a high standard. Justice has also talked about his intention to blend the lines between the game sound and reality, creating a world of ‘warped realism’. I like this focus on immersion, and as this is something Taphobos also aims to do (with the coffin), I’ll try to take cues from Justice in this area.

In this clip, the player actually explores a church, not too dissimilar to the one i’m designing for in Taphobos. This space is an ideal reference point for when I’m creating sounds, and there are elements i’ll take from this for my own creation. I love the huge space as the character enters the huge hall, but i’m not too keen on the lack of space when in the smaller areas – although this makes sense, I think a lot of the sounds in the smaller areas would diffuse into the reverb in the larger areas. When I implement my sounds into Taphobos I think i’ll mix in more reverb – maybe at a distance – from the larger reverb areas. I also really like the ambient tone, almost like a presence in the room. I also really like the occasionally weird sounds mix into the ambience, again using justice’s idea of blurring reality and insanity.

The two main elements to evaluate – the footsteps and the ambience – are both done really well. Again, I think more variation in the samples used for the footsteps would be beneficial – and again this is probably due to sound file budget limitations, as I mentioned in a previous post. The ambience is perfect – and pretty much exactly what i’m looking to re-create; a low, ominous rumble, small ‘one-shots’ with interesting content to add some life to the sound (myself and james discussed rat scuttling or faint wind in the background) and a lovely air to the space. It’s likely mixed into an overall reverb, along with the footsteps and other character sounds.

(LO2)

This Saturday the time came again for me to head to the GAN meetup, a group of game sound designers and composers based in the north of England, who meet every two months to chat and network. It was my third GAN, having been twice to the meetup in York and Leeds.

This time GAN was in Liverpool, just a few streets away from LIPA. We were joined by a few students from LIPA, including friends both old and new of mine, who study there. There was the usual group of attendees, plus one special guest; academic and film-maker Karen Collins joined us, and I was lucky enough to chat to her over a few pints. Karen is one of the few academics to write about game audio, and doubtlessly the leader in the field. She’s also making a documentary – BEEP: A Documentary History of Game Sound, which I chatted to her about and she shared some of the process behind the film, due March this year. As always, I made new connections and friendships with fellow sound designers from all over the north of England, many of whom i’m sure I’ll see again in the future.

Dark Souls is a third-person, role-playing, fantasy game, set in the fictional kingdom of Lordran. I’ve decided to use Dark Souls as a reference point for Taphobos, and will evaluate its sound in this post.

In all of these game sound evaluation posts, I will explore two main areas of the sound, and then eventually i’ll do a big post about both and how i’ve drawn from other games to create the sounds for mine. Those two main areas are footsteps and ambience. Aside from object sounds, Taphobos’ main sound elements are the footsteps of the player, and the ambience of the location.

The footsteps in Dark Souls are a key element to the characters movement. Although my game is first-person (from the POV of the character) and this game is third-person (the camera is above or behind the character), I still think it is a relevant reference and something I can draw from for inspiration.

The footsteps are heavy and chunky, reflecting the characters heavy walk and pronounced presence. This video illustrates the footsteps clearly, and also features environments similar to those in Taphobos. I like how clear and bold the footsteps are, they react well with the ambience of the environments and I also like the added body movement mixed in with the footsteps. The different surfaces are very obvious, perhaps too obvious in places, but nevertheless, they aptly describe the texture of the surface audibly. The only negative I can really see in regards to the footsteps in this section is the repetitiveness and the fact you can clearly tell the footstep recordings are repeated. It also doesn’t sound like the pitch of the files were modulated at all, this is a trick that can be used very effectively to add to the perceived realism of the sound. I imagine the limited number of footsteps sound files was a result of both a limited audio file budget (the game’s overall size is limited, and as such the audio only has a specific amount of that space to use) and possibly the fact it was released on consoles before PC, and consoles often have a smaller capacity than PCs. It could further be because the game has such a variety of sounds and a large number of variations, only a small number of individual sound files could be allocated from the audio budget.

Given that my game is both for PC, and also has a relatively limited number of sounds, so the audio budget isn’t a massive concern – as such, I can use a larger number of footstep recordings and create more of a sense of realism. I’m actually yet to speak to the developer about the amount of space I have for audio, this is something i’ll discuss when I meet with him next.

The second main element I want to focus on is ambience. Ambiences are tricky, because technically the environment may not have a large number of sound emitters (acoustically speaking), but the sound designer still has to fill that space with *something* as the player expects to hear a solid ambient background. Much of Dark Souls takes place in large halls, caves and other such reverberating chambers, similar to the church in Taphobos. A trick I have noticed the designers used for these huge echoing spaces, is to create ‘real’ drones, a low, rumbling, ever-present hum made of indistinguishable elements. In this example, we hear this low rumbling drone, as well as some water droplet sounds peppered into the mix. For pretty much the entirety of the ambience in this scene, the main element is this rumble. I had initially intended my church environment to be relatively empty in Taphobos, but I think filling it with some kind of subtle drone like this would be very cool. Perhaps changing the drone’s properties as the character moves through the different environments would be a good idea to explore. My other environment is outside, in a graveyard. Again, other than objects, the ambience sound emitters are limited – although not as limited as the interior. In this example from Dark Souls, the space is filled with rustling trees, distant creatures and animals, light rain and occasional wind. These are some key elements I can include in my own ambient soundscape; myself and the developer have already discussed the prominence of trees in the environments, so this is something I will certainly draw from. I like the modulating, evolving nature of the tree rustle, although I feel as if the constant, almost wall of sound, is almost overpowering. When listening for a long period of time and focusing directly on the ambience, some glaring repetition becomes clear. Again, this is probably largely due to the restricted audio budget limiting the length of the ambient loops.
Lastly, this is another similar environment in Dark Souls to the church in Taphobos: another droning rumble, this time less bassy and with perhaps more depth to the reverb, but again a maintained ambience soundscape. I like this particularly, and I think i’ll explore something similar in Taphobos.

Overall, Dark Souls is a very dark and specifically ‘fantasy’ game, something Taphobos is definitely not. However, it does focus on realism and the use of ambience is a great one – these are influences I will take in my sound to make Taphobos both believable and immersive.

(LO2)

Today, I put on a mini game audio workshop at uni. I’d had the idea for a while – as a number of people had asked me to show them how to use FMOD – so I decided to pull together some interested audio people to spend a day learning how to make game sounds and implement them. It went really well, we had a good mix of participants from the 3 years, and despite having a number of drop outs, we still got 6 attendees. Although this isn’t a huge amount, i’m happy with it as a first session. Retrospectively, I should really have thought more about the actual delivery of the workshop, and maybe created more resources/examples/tutorials for the beginners to better understand the concept I was trying to explain. I also came up against first years struggling to use pro tools and zooms (which I hadn’t considered), but they managed still to make some cool noises and implement them.

My hope for the next event is to pull someone in from the industry to not only come and talk to us, but to also give us some hands-on insight into implementation and their role in a game studio. I’m considering possibly asking Jey Kazi – a friend of mine from the Game Audio North meetups.