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.

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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.

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James (the developer of Taphobos) invited me along to a game jam in Nottingham a few weeks ago, and I was glad to join him. It was a weekend jam called ‘ART / GAMES / HACK’ which intended to bring together digital artists and game developers to create interesting  games and interactive experiences. Myself and James knew we worked well together with FMOD and Unity, and I thought it’d be good to build my relationship with him over the weekend.

We made a cool little game based on the classic arcade fighting games of yesteryear. I made some cool retro sounds, and made a retro 8-bit style soundtrack for the game.

A few weeks ago I attended Rezzed, a game convention in London. I went with a few friends of mine from Game Audio North, and we explored all of the many games that were showing at the event. Taphobos was shown at Rezzed last year, and sadly I wasn’t able to be there with any of the games i’m working on at the moment (one day though). Prior to the event however, I realised that I knew a large number of people – both that i’d met in person previously, or knew from twitter, that were attending Rezzed. I decided to pull together a little impromptu game audio meetup, and suggest the game audio people around went for a pint together. Incredibly, after I pushed it quite a bit on social media, we managed to get a turn out of 20 people – which I was pretty impressed with. I caught up with some old friends, and met some new ones, including the composer I worked with on my last game, Hashtag Dungeon.

In early April I attended the game audio north meetup, my fourth so far. At this stage it’s mostly old faces, and a few new people to chat too as well. It was held in York, and around 15 people showed up – the usual mix of masters’ students, freelancers, PHD students and those working in AAA. I found a number of people were interested in Taphobos (and the latest game i’ve just announced i’ll be working on) and I picked up a few tips in regards to my FMOD technique.