Advanced Interactive Audio PostMortem
Section 1 = Introduction
Hi there, I’m Jameson Parker. I’m a happy Full Sail student currently pursuing my Bachelor’s Degree in Recording Arts. Now in month 14 of my curriculum, I’m finally able to do what every college student wishes he could do, PLAY VIDEO GAMES! Oh wait! Not so fast. By play video games I mean more to “study” video games. Why? Well this month I had the pleasure of being tasked to not only create, but to also implement all kinds of game audio assets like environment ambiences, explosions, weapons, collectables, etc. In this postmortem I will be telling you about what I learned while working within Unreal Engine 4, some of the things that I found worked out well and then some of the things that I feel could have been better, and how.
Intro = UE4 Platformer
The first game we worked on this month was the UE4 Platformer game. This game consists of a short movie clip followed by a constantly moving forward platformer game where you’re a robot running away from the guys chasing you in the intro movie. Having creative freedom with which to design and implement my assigned sound assets, I wanted the aesthetics of the audio to action packed and also to add a little depth to what is a pretty shallow plot to start with. The environment is a downtown city with havoc all around. My initial tasks included sound assets for footsteps, ambiences, and character sounds. I ended up with much more that that in the end. There were a few challenges along the way and a few of those I never did get to act just right.
Sound design (Assets and Music)
The two biggest parts of the sound design in this game is the Non-Interactive cinematic cut scene at the beginning of the game and the music. The intro cut scene went through a few different iterations. It started as just car and tire sound effects with simple machine gunfire. It ended up being dialogue, more vehicle sounds, explosions, people running and screaming, and background music. Animation sequences and matinees were also on the list for needed sound assets. Later I’ll talk about an issue with implementation that I never quite solved although I’m still working on it now in my free time. User Interface sounds and in game interactions turned out to have to a major impact on the overall feel of the audio assets later in the sound design process because one of the audio effects tied to in game UI’s is a slow down effect where all audio assets, including the background music slow down to half speed and then speed back up again. Most of my assets worked out just fine but the thing that kept going wrong was the slide asset. The sound of the idle slide would sometimes last longer than animation and I couldn’t find a way to control it effectively. That’s something that I would have been able to quickly handle inside of wWise now that I’ve had some experience working with it.
Music
I relied heavily on the music to drive the emotion and action in the game. The Music included 4 loops that went with the Intro, Main Gameplay, Outro Win, and Outro Lose. The genre of the music I composed for this game was dubstep because dubstep matched the energy and grungy feel of the action in the game. A robot escaping cyborg looking bad buys definitely fits with dubstep. When we implemented the music for the primary gameplay, the beat drops on the robots third bang on the door just as the door flies off the back of the truck and slides across the street. What made it all come together was when the slow-motion effect took place and the dubstep slowed to a crawl only to enhance the genre of the music all at the same time. The slowdown sounds intentionally a part of the composition; it works with the music and gives me a smile every time I hear it. Along with the visuals in the matinees, the music at the end of the level acts as a signifier of whether or not you got a high score or if you’ll have to try again.
Were the goals achieved?
The goal from the start was to simply get my initially assigned assets recorded, edited, and implemented. Well, as I became a bit more familiar with the layout of UE4 and how much could be done with it I decided to have fun as I wen through this project. I was very happy with the results of the finished game. I feel that time was managed effectively and as a result there was extra time towards the end to go back and add new and interesting details to the game. I took my Zoom H4n outside the classroom and recorded dialogue between myself and my brother (me with an accent) to represent the cyborg-looking guys chasing the robot in the beginning cut scene. The only problem I noticed with my cut-scene audio in the beginning was that if the scene was skipped, the audio kept going, overlapping the gameplay background music. Given a little better time management I could have probably figured that out.
Retrospect
Looking back over the platformer project, I see that keeping files organized is very important. Fortunately Unreal makes keeping files organized very easy. Practicing common workflow standards like putting comments on blueprints also help to cut down on time spent looking for the right place to find what you’re looking for. I learned a lot from doing this project and would highly recommend it to anyone learning to implement game audio in Unreal Engine 4.
Introduction to LIMBO
Intro – Limbo Postmortem
Having just finished our first game audio assignment, I was looking forward to working with a team to prepare a new list of assets for the game Limbo. Limbo is a spooky 2d platform game in a mysterious setting in the woods. You play as a little boy who wakes up there and you just progress forward trying to find your sister. There are incredibly fatal dangers along the way that are designed to keep the player tense and in suspense. Our asset list included a list of different types of footsteps, deaths, objects and interactions with them within the environment, and ambiences. This was a project that required some good organization and great teamwork. We learned a few lessons the hard way as we worked towards our end goal but in the end we were happy with our results.
Research
Before we embarked on this assignment, our team first chose a reference game to base the aesthetics of our game on. We chose Bioshock and did our research on what things made the soundscape of this game unique. I watched a few YouTube videos of gameplay and an interview of the composer, Gary Schyman. I didn’t quite feel that that was enough to really give me a solid idea of the feel of the audio in the game so I checked a copy of Bioshock 2 out from the library on campus. I noticed several things about the detail with which the audio in that game was approached. There was an obvious attention to detail to things like spatialization, effective use random audio containers, and the reverb of the level’s environments. I paid attention to the psycho-acoustic use of eerie drones in the background of the game to create a tense atmosphere. I felt that the most announced detail about the audio in the game was how the suit the player wears is so heavy with metal feet that sound really big and heavy. So much to the point that sometimes I thought something else was in the room with me and turned around quickly to see nothing. Something just that simple eventually made me feel more comfortable in that creepy environment because I felt my character was big, strong, and powerful. Our team was using the Audio Middleware “wWise” to implement audio so we felt confident that we’d have the audio tools necessary to pull off our desired aesthetic.
What did I attempt to create in terms of aesthetic and sound design and why?
Well in our Limbo game we went just for the opposite of that for our player. Like Bioshock, we did base the perceived size of the footprint assets off the player’s size, which is rather small and fragile in this game. We designed them to be light but with enough high frequency content to cut through the mix. This was important because we chose to create a heavy atmosphere with our ambiences. Some parts of these ambiences contained everything from eerie drones and medium to heavy winds blowing to cave environments and a boat environment. We contrasted the gameplay ambience from the pause menu ambience by making the eerie drone much more present. The other difference between our game and Bioshock was that our game had 2d sound in comparison to the 3D spatialized audio of Bioshock.
Were the goals achieved? Was Implementation Successful?
My team and I were ultimately happy with our end result. We did a lot of learning along the way when it came down to implementation. (What went wrong?) We kept getting snagged on one particular issue, which basically was a result of having a play action and a stop action for the same audio asset in one event. This mistake was done in the first place in attempt to keep identical ambience files from playing back on top of each other. This was also tied to an issue with two very similarly named events happening at almost the same time, both of them having the ambience assets assigned to them. Fixing that gave us time to analyze the prototype of our mix and tweak a few settings. This was an opportunity to focus on more of the creative detail surrounding the over-arching aesthetic of our mix balance. We spent some time re-working our background ambiences, paying close attention to the attenuation between one ambience and another. We lowered our background ambiences to where our footsteps were much more present. wWise’s convolution reverb was available but I didn’t have any readily available impulse responses so we used the wWise reverb. We created an audio bus dedicated to adding a little reverb to the boy’s movements to emphasize the space he’s in but also bring attention to how alone he is in the woods. This contrast in volume gave our team an opportunity to use a wide dynamic range to emphasize the sound of player deaths. I was specifically responsible for the falling and impaling death assets and I had fun making those sounds. I made sure to exaggerate the impact of the falling death and make the impaling death sounds gutsy with a side of sharp metallic!
How Was Time Management?
We did pretty good considering Evan and I finished most of our assets days before they were due. We still went back to the redo most of our assets when we got to the implementation stage because not quite all of them matched our intended aesthetic at first. Some of the sounds just weren’t bold enough so we gave them more presence in the mix and also re-designed some of them multiple times. Time management eventually went a little south when one of our team members dropped the course before he shared the assets he recorded with us. There was an hour of studio production time lost going out to record those sounds
Looking Back
With a large number of assets constantly being updated, it was important to maintain consistency across all categories of our sound effects. We could have been a little more organized as we got closer to the deadline for submitting our final game but we did manage to get everything finished that needed to be done. Also, losing a team member in the middle of our project wasn’t fun. This was a lesson learned by the developers over at Naughty Dog Studios. In the future, we’ll collect everyone’s assets to a common storage location before they leave for the day. That could help get rid of that headache and re-doing work in the future.
