Category Archives: Research

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Feedback: Kyle Worral

I also spoke to sound designer Kyle Worral, based in Leeds. He gave me some very helpful feedback to my work:

‘Hey man, a few thoughts on the sound design, it seems like the footsteps are the same for all the surfaces? or they sound the same at least, I’m not sure if maybe the foley layers are different ?

Also, I really like the way you’ve set the tower up, as it sounds different the higher you get, but I feel like maybe the room ambience in the ground floor of the tower and the larger room are too similar, although the door and wind sounds were really well done.So yeah all in all it’s really good, but a surface detection blueprint would be good as it’d add more variety to your footstep sounds (would also be good to add some pitch and volume modulation to them) and maybe try altering the room tones some more as it’ll separate them a bit more but overall it’s really good’.

 

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Feedback: Kevin Doran

I also spoke to Kevin Doran, a game audio programmer and sound designer, and he gave me some fantastic feedback on my work:

‘I quite like the footstep sound, but they obviously need to be randomised a bit, and placed spatially to appear below the player.
 
Candles don’t make a sound, so I would take that sound out to be honest.
 
Definitely needs to play on the reverb, these are well designed spacious places, so as much as the character is generating sounds (i.e. through footsteps), the sounds should interact with their space as well. Walking up those stairs need nice heavy wooden thuds that reverberate all the way up the spire.
 
The ambience is nice, but it’s a little bass heavy. I’d reference it against other atmospheric games to get a better sense of what’s generally accepted. It feels claustrophobic in an otherwise spacious level.
 
Otherwise, I really like what’s going on sonically. Lots of interesting little sounds that give the place personality.
 
Not sure if it’s the compression hiding them, but some higher frequency sounds could be nice too. A few mice scuttlings, and wind howls of the 2k+ range.
 
Most churches aren’t very interesting when it comes to incidental sounds. Your best bet is to have a convolution reverb in your game and feed it plain sounds maybe. I don’t know how complex that is though, but the best thing about a church is not the sounds that happen in it, but how it changes the harmonic content of those sounds.
 
And I’m envious that you get to work on such a cool looking project, haha. I’m still hacking away at the boring stuff. You deserve it after all that study though.
 
If you can figure out the programming, you could make some really convincing spaces. I like how Fallout 4 has handled it’s sound in relation to space. Uses the doppler effect, the way sound travels over long distances with regards to wavelength, and how they handle various acoustic spaces. Of course they have a massive team, but you don’t need to model caves, and warehouses, so you might be able to narrow down to some of the core features. Just great for inspiration in any case’.
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Feedback: Katie Tarrant

I decided a good final step to the process would be to contact some professional sound designers for their opinions on my work. As I personally know a number of sound designers, I sent my work over to them for their advice on my sounds. This has given me some extremely helpful pointers from which to improve my process, approach to sound design in games and the sound in Taphobos specifically.

The first person I spoke to was Katie Tarrant, a composer and sound designer, based in Liverpool. She gave me some helpful feedback:

‘I love the ambience and overall sounds are great, the only thing I’d say is the footsteps have a slight metal clink sound to them? Which might get a bit grating on the ear over the duration of long term play. They didn’t feel too repetitive, it was only the clink sound that prevented it from fitting in. I think adding a weighted sound on the jumps would be cool too.
 
But that’s it, overall it’s great!
 
Really great crafting of the environment’.

 

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FMOD Approach: Joanna Orland

Sound Designer Joanna Orland gave a talk back at GDC ’09 about the construction of ambience, entitled: ‘Bringing Ambience To The Foreground: Enhancing Emotion Through Ambient Sound Design’, and this has also formed a foundational basis to my approach to the sound ambience in Taphobos. The whole talk is fantastic, but I have particularly honed in on the section in which she talks about surreal vs real sound within a soundscape.  I’ve used this to great effect in my approach to constructing the sound of Taphobos – Orland talks about the use of surreal sound in horror specifically, and how the ambience leans heavily on surrealist sounds to sell the fear element of the visual. She also notes that the character sounds, the footsteps and foley, are kept painfully real, in order to connect the player/viewer to the character. I’ve done the same in Taphobos – the player sounds, footsteps, foley etc are all very dry, very clear and very real sounding. The ambience however, is not – the actual sound of a church is very mundane, and very bland. I’ve hyped it however, and included a lot of extra elements – to give it more life. I also included elements – such as the bowed cymbals – which add a lot of surrealist creepiness to the scene.

(LO4)

 

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FMOD Approach: The Banner Saga

Michael Theiler of Kpow Audio wrote a guest post on designing sound back in 2012, about his approach to the construction of ambience. He wrote about his experience of designing ambience for LA Noire, as well as for The Banner Saga. I really liked his approach to the ambience on the Banner Saga, and this has been a foundation for my own approach to the construction of ambience in Taphobos.

Essentially, the team created what is called a ‘procedural ambience’, not to be confused with procedural audio (synthesis). Procedural sound design is the process by which elements are broken down as far as possible, multiple variations of each sound are recorded, and then chosen at random in the gameplay. In the case of the Banner Saga, Kpow audio used a selection of different relevant sounds to play around a specific area that correspond with the visual. This can be seen and heard clearly in the video below, where randomly triggered shouts, anvils, seagulls, wind and other relevant sounds make up a complex and believable ambience.

 

This is the same approach I used in Taphobos – the sound design of the ambience is procedural, broken down into many tiny elements that are triggered randomly by FMOD. The sound of a church is fairly mundane – and lifeless – so I had to take some artistic licence to create an interesting ambience for the space. I’ve selected a number of sources that I think are relevant and interesting in the space, recorded a number of variations of them and mixed them into the main bed of ambience in the church level. This is made up of metal knocks and bangs, bowed cymbals, wooden creaks, wind, and other recordings. I go into detail about this process and how it is implemented in FMOD in my posts about the FMOD session.

(LO4)