Guest Talk: Jessica Saunders – Game Audio 101

On Thursday of Week 8 we were given a talk by game developer and sound designer Jessica Saunders. She has previously worked for AAA companies like Rare, Codemasters, & Rocksteady and now runs her own game company, Salix Games, recieving high praise for their most recent release Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey. She has also recieved multiple awards and nominations including those at the BAFTA awards and the Guildford Game Awards.

What is Game Audio?

• Asset Creation
  • Recording
  • Designing
  • Sourcing
• Implementation
  • Triggers
  • Events
  • Optimisation
• Pipelines

Components of Game Audio

Ambience

Ambience is the starting point when creating the soundscape for a space, usually starting from a single “tone”, like wind rushing in an outdoor scene or electric hum in an indoors one. Then particular point sources e.g bird sounds, etc. can be added in. Reverb can be baked in to the ambience but this can also be added in dynamically afterwards. Occlusion of outside sounds should also be considered.

Example: A Forest

• Where? – Geographic location decides flora/fauna
• When? – Dusk, Dawn, Night, Day
• What? – Is in the forest? Something in the distance, enemies, living creatures etc.
• Gameplay – What does the gameplay guide the player towards?
• Type – Types of forest will sound different
• Weather – What’s the weather like?

Walla

Walla is the term for crowd sounds, also known as loop groups. They are created bespoke for different areas of the game, and are almost always necessary to record for areas where groups of 5+ people talking. They should be reactive to events in the game, for example. It should also be treated like ambience in terms of editing, and can be chopped and faded in freely.

Example: Someone with a Giant Sword walks into a bar

• When? – Modern? Period piece? This changes the sound of the group e.g gendered dialogue
• What? – What is going on? Is the bar full or closing?
• Context? – Should the person be there? Is there a reaction to them? Is there a fight or people listening to music?

Foley

• Recreation of real-world sounds
• Adds depth and realism
• Grounds the characters and the player to the world
• More than just footsteps – Any physical sound caused by movement
• Requires thought and study of movement
  • Variety is key to avoid lack of immersion – at least 7 takes of each sound is good

Example: Two People sit down for a cup of tea

• Who? – Who/What are they?
• Materials – What are they wearing? Bells, weapons, natural/synthetic materials
• When? – Modern or period piece?
• What? – Is there furniture? What is it made of?
• How? – How are they sitting down? Do they need to move chairs?
• Weather? – Do clothes sound sandy? Wet?

Sound Design

• Anything “unreal”
  • Guns, explosions, physics sounds (not one-shot canned sounds)
  • Creatures, particles
• Can cross over with music and foley

Case Study: Batman

• Physics and Destructibles – Wood crates, street lamps, road signs that break, slide and stop on several materials, how quickly they stop, whether they fall over, objects crunching against tires, objects denting a vehicle, destructible collectibles.
  • Start element
  • Looping middle element
  • End element

Case Study: Linear Sound

• Dialogue for exposition in cutscene
• Over-the-top voice acting for “illusion” of fantasy
• Re-used pain sound effects

Example: Standing in front of a creature

• Where? – Are we outside or inside? Underwater? In space?
• Scale – How big is the creature? How close are you to it?
• What? – How does the creature work? What is its biology? What environment does it reside in? What is the creature itself doing?

UI Sounds

• More than just blips and beeps!
• Solely relays information to the player
• Sits above the rest of the game soundscape
• Avoid repetition for multi-sounds (collectibles)
• Cohesive, small suite of sounds so the player knows what’s happening subconsciously
• Happy/Sad/Neutral tones

Case Study: Batman

• UI Buttons
  • Small clicks with heavy reverb with long tail, synthetic sounds only
  • Digital glitch sounds similar to circuit broken sounds
• Detective Mode
  • Read out character lines with heavy reverb and delay in background for ambience
  • Real-time parameter control fed in for speed/pitch to simulate rewinding through the scene.

Music

• As a sound designer you work on music implementation
• Dealing with pipelines
• Does your composer understand video games?
• A sound designer/composer combo is very rare, unless you have been in the industry for many years. Unless you are a genius you will be mediocre at both
• Composer is a fulltime job, Sound design is a fulltime job.
• Can you/Should you have “interactive” music?
• Sometimes sound design and music will cross over
• “Stings” are much more common in games

Example: Diegetic Music in Batman

• Harley Quinn music box
  • Simple 16 bar melody on harpsichord and music box
  • Pre-recorded music put into space
  • Sound of crank
  • Procedural random speed-up
  • “Wind-up” sound before explosion
  • Ducks for non-diegetic score (important for story)

Example: Maze Demo

• Fading/”wind-down” of diegetic music with reverb
• Synthetic sounds in low ambience, quiet
• Introduction of non-diegetic music while entering the maze
• Instruments are louder when in proximity of the monster

Dialogue

• Working with actors
• Dialogue editing and post-processing
• Casting
  • Mainly in more senior roles
• Types of Dialogue
  • Combat Barks
    • High/low intensity
  • Player thoughts
  • NPC callouts
  • Cutscenes

Example: Cutscene

• Initial dialogue by developers for pacing
• Animation team does initial lipsync pass
• Voice actors provide recorded audio
• Animation team does final pass
• Sound design team adds additional audio and post-processing

Questions

• Getting into the industry
  • PC Software like Pro Tools/Reaper
  • Practicing w/ sound effect libraries – sales on packs