2024

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DARKFIELD - ARCADE

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I went to see DARKFIELD’s new show, ARCADE, and had a great time in pitch-black darkness!

 
 

I’ve been aware of DARKFIELD’s immersive audio experiences for a couple of years now, but whenever one of their live shows has previously been exhibiting in the UK, it’s usually been showcasing in London only. While this isn’t exactly deal-breaker, it has meant that I’ve not always been in a position time-wise to get down South and check things out.

However, seeing that DARKFIELD were coming to Bradford this week (very much my neck of t’woods) with their latest project as part of the BD: Festival, I pretty much immediatley booked a ticket right away.

For a bit of context, DARKFIELD describe ARCADE as:

…the latest immersive audio experience from DARKFIELD, but this isn’t an ordinary arcade and these are not ordinary arcade machines. Every machine offers you the chance to enter the world of the game and choose your own unique journey. As you guide your avatar through a world ravaged by endless war, there are many routes you can take and there are many different outcomes.

 
 

With this experience being set totally in the dark, and delieverd to the listener via a pair of closed-back headphones…I naturally don’t really have anything I can visually show of ARCADE here! As the experience is stylised take on the choose-your-own adventure format, I also don’t want to spoil anything major in case you want to things for for yourself. If you will permit me to lightly tread into very mild spoiler territory though…

…then let’s just say I found myself in quite a range of exciting moments during my 30-minute adventure in the dark. These ranged from an intense gunfight, a rendevious with an old flame at a fancy resturaunt, a high-speed car chase and an unnervingly quiet section, set in an industrial backroom, which was suprisingly intense. While the particular ending I arrived wasn’t exactly what you might call a happy ending…it was, nontheless, still a lot of fun!

As you might expect with an entirely audio-led experience, ARCADE’s sound design and mix were really well done. There’s some great moments of audio working in tandem with haptics too (I’ll leave that to your imagination) which were very effective at pulling you into the story at key points. It did feel a little intense at times (particularly at moments of failure), and I felt that the brief tutorial drops you in just a tad too quickly without a lot of time to get fully acclimatised to the pacing and controls. But overall, it sounded great and I had a great time!

ARCADE is heading to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this year in August, so if you’re fringe-bound and into interactive audio, then I’d say absolutley give it a try.

(P.S. If you’ve read this far, Dear Reader, and you do decide to play ARCADE yourself, then here’s a tip free of charge: DO NOT ANSWER THE DOOR WHEN YOU FIRST WAKE UP! You can thank me later 😉)

 
 
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Develop Brighton '24

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Time to check off another ‘to-do’ item from my game audio ‘career’ list - I’ve attended my first Develop:Brighton conference!

 
 

I’ve been meaning to attend Develop for some time now, but for the past couple of years, whenever July rolls around I have usually been knee-deep in production on a project (i.e. sat in a hot, non-airconditioned room with a weighty and usually very sweaty VR headset strapped to my face) and not in a good position to step away from my desk.

So, with that not being the case this year, I have finally made the pilgramge down to sunny Brighton, I’m delighted to say that I had an amazing time!

It’s really nice (particularly in this new age of remote working) to catch up and be physically present in the same place with the friends and colleagues you’ve been working with on Discord/Slack throughout the year, but are normally too far apart to meet up with regularly.

The audio talks I attended on the Thursday were all very insightful - I lost count of the number of ‘penny drop’ moments that were happening my brain! In particular, the walkthrough of the audio implementaiton for gunshot sound effects in the Alan Wake 2 and Battlefield 2042 were really interesting and helpful talks. These will definitley be useful inspirations for me to draw upon going forward.

I’m looking forward to Develop Brighton ‘25 already!

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Game Audio Symposium '24

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Another trip around the sun means another Game Audio Symposium is in the books!

 

I chose a different answer to the favourite game audio question this time around. Here’s to hoping that my indecisiveness doesn’t get me barred from GAS ‘25 😬

 

Game Audio Symposium (hosted at Leeds Met University) has grown from one-day event to a two-day schedule this year, so there were even more really interesting talks to listen to this time around.

I could only attend the Friday talks this year unfortunatley, but the ones I did see were great. I particularly enjoyed Kevin Doran’s talk, ‘A Word to the Wwise - Hot Tips for Profiling’, which covered using WAQL (Wwise Authoring Query Langauge) in conjunction with the Wwise profiler…which I think has finally convinced me to start learning WAQL. Wish me luck!

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May '24

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Hey! Here are some of the things I’ve been working on this month:

Sound Re-Design - Killer Instinct - Jago Character Intro

Re-Design Details 📋:

- Total Time Spent: 6.5h

- Source Limitations: No library material

- Plug-in Limitations: Free plug-ins only

The 2013 reboot of Killer Instinct is a favourite game of mine. I didn’t play a lot of the original arcade cabinets or the console ports back in’t day, but there was something about the reboot that just seemed to catch me at the right moment in time.

I became really engrossed in the gameplay mechanics, and at one point, would sometimes find myself practicing matches in my head during random idle moments during the day. Obsessed is probably the right word!

Like all good fighting games, Killer Instinct has a large variety of characters to choose from, each of which has their own unique intro and win cutscenes at the start & end of a match. Recently, when searching for interesting cutscenes/game cinematics to use for sound re-designs, I thought back to those Killer Instinct character cutscenes and felt a lightbulb-esque “A-ha!” moment go off in my head.

The KI character cutscenes are short and snappy (approximatley five to ten seconds long) and feature a character doing cool moves and pulling flashy poses. This makes them pretty much the perfect size and scope for a sound re-design; there’s plenty of visual detail and stylised movements to dig into from an audio perspective, yet the short runtime means they don’t feel as overwhelming to mix and manage when compared to a typical 3-5 minute gameplay cinematic.

So, the first of these Killer Instinct character cutscenes I’ve decided to tackle is the intro for Jago, the Tiger Warrior monk. To push my recording and editing skills with these shorter re-designs, I’ve set myself specific conditions I have to follow when working, which are:

  1. No library material - I can only use source that I have recorded myself (with the exception of IR samples for use in convolution reverbs).

  2. Free Plug-ins only - I can only design and mix with free plug-ins, and not paid ones (mainly sticking to the REA/js plug-ins in Reaper).

I’ve spent roughly 6.5 hours on this re-design to date, and I’m fairly happy with where I was able to get it to in that time.

I feel like areas that worked well were the reverb switchover on the chanting, which transitions from a far perspective to a closer-up and drier one with the camera move, and the metal foley clinks ‘n’ clanks for Jago’s sword and bracer movements. For these sounds, I recorded large antique coins in a metallic chain dice bag, and a leather pouch full of coins and some loose door keys!

 

Some of the Foley props I recorded to make Jago's jingles!

 

An area I’d like to go back on and improve in a future design pass would be the transient/impact for the hand clap. I feel like as this is the main action point of the scene, this probably could do with being bigger & beefier to get a more dramatic ‘thunderclap’ sort of vibe. I think further attention and adjustments to my side-chain compression settings would be beneficial here too, so that the clap can punch through the other mix layers more clearly.

Jago’s intro cutscene is one of the more understated cutscenes in the game. Working on this one first was a nice place for me to get started, and has also given me a good jumping off point for how I’d like to tackle re-designs for some of the more visually complex characters in the roster.

Kilgore, a big rusty Terminator-style robot, is the one I’ll be working on next. Time to go gather lots of metal samples!

 

Kilgore: 'koming' up next!

 

Sound Re-Design - Resident Evil 4 Remake - Cage Fight Cutscene

Re-Design Details 📋

- Total time spent: 11h
- Source Limitations: None
- Plug-in Limitations: None

I’m still enjoying blasting & stabbing my way through Resident Evil 4 Remake, which for me, is one of those games that seems to never ever get stale, no matter how many times I’ve already played it.

I was actually not a particularly big fan of the original Resident Evil 4 when it released in 2005 (I mourned the loss of the fixed camera angles which gave the 2002 Resident Evil Remake so much of its spooky character) but over the years I’ve warmed to it. Now, I really appreciate the game for what it is - a best-in-class action-adventure game, wrapped up in a spooky murder-cult aesthetic.

The 2023 remake is faithful to the 2005 title, but also brings a lot of new ideas and mechanics to the original’s gameplay loop to keep things fresh (the knife parry system is, quite frankly, amazing). There’s new cutscenes to boot too, including some very cool John-Wick inspired fight scenes where Leon gets to unleash his marksman & martial arts prowess on hordes of cultist goons.

I picked this ‘cage fight’ scene that happens about halfway through the story to use as a sound re-design, as I wanted to work on an action sequence that would be a good vehicle for developing my gunshot and melee combat sound design skills.

I’ve spent 11 hours on this re-design so far, and I feel mostly happy with the results I’ve been able to achieve, but there are aspects of the mix that I’d like to go back and adjust in another design pass.

On the whole, I generally feel pleased with how the gunshot sounds have come together, but having had some more time to reflect and critically listen to them, I think these need to be louder in the mix, in order to make them really ‘crack’. I also think I need to adjust the gunshot mixing to be more responsive according to each new camera position - i.e. use more reverb on the gunshot sounds when the camera is further away and looking down on the action compared to when the camera is tucked in nice and tight for a close-up.

I really enjoyed getting in the detailed little creaks and squeaks of Leon’s combat harness and clothing, along with the exaggerated whooshes for when the unlucky cultist gets whirled around. The arrow impact sounds that slam into that same cultist’s head just after this do feel a little loose timing-wise though, and probably could do with some different layers too.

Much like Resident Evil 4 Remake is a fun game to replay, I feel like this re-design will also be a fun one to revisit too again and again too. Here’s to hoping I can score an S-rank next time round!

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Under Cover - Meet The Team Feature

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I appeared on Coatsink’s socials earlier this month as one of their ‘Meet the Team’ segments for the upcoming launch of Under Cover!

Not long to wait until launch day now, just under a month to go. To quote Wolfenstein, “Get Psyched!”