2020 Update

Howdy doody folks!

Hope you’re all safe and well out there - at the time of writing, everything’s still in lockdown here in the UK with the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst things are on a bit of a lull at the moment and the flow of time itself feels convoluted, I thought now would perhaps be a good time to write a quick post on what I’ve been up to lately.

It’s been a while since my last blog post, and despite the scary state of the world at the moment, 2020 has been a pretty busy year for me so far, despite all the chaos. I can’t go into any specifics, but I will say that I’ve worked at Immotion Studios on a couple of super fun projects throughout February and March, and I’ve been working as a freelance sound designer for We Make Audio since early Feb!

I’ve also got a couple of half-finished projects I’ve had on the backburner for absolutely ages now, so I thought now would finally be a good time to actually get these finished up and put out in the world. These include my Steampunk Robot sound pack, as well as some music tracks from a couple of different projects that I never got around to releasing. Watch this space for a little bit longer, and I’ll have them out as soon as possible…I hope!

I’ve also been getting a lot of emails from audio students asking for help with Wwise implementation issues in the Unity 3D Game Kit, so I’m considering possibly making some kind of short tutorial or walkthrough to act as a standalone guide that hopefully helps people out? If you’re reading this and that’s something that would appeal to you, then definitely get in touch and let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like me to cover - I’ll see what I can rustle up when I get chance.

Stay safe and make some cool sounds! :)

School of Video Game Audio - Monster Sounds

Made some fun monster sounds this week on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course. I had to design and implement the sound for the enemy Evil Spit Plant in the Wwise Adventure game.

Sound Design

I approached my design for the enemy plant death sound by first recording gameplay footage of the plant death animation. After watching this animation numerous times, I decided to break the plant death sound down into four constituent parts that matched the character's death animation. These parts were screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts;

Screams

For the scream sounds, I used samples from the Monster Within sound pack by Soundmorph. I wanted to get a short, punchy pain sound that would immediately indicate to the player that they had successfully killed the spit plant. I found a collection of small monster shrieks in this pack that fit my needs perfectly.

Gurgles

Directly following the scream, I wanted a longer, drawn-out death gurgle to go with the enemy plant's writhing death animation, to suggest that it's still in considerable pain as it thrashes around in its death throes. I recorded these sounds myself by making some croaky, gurgling noises in my throat - disgusting, I know, but hey, they sounded pretty good and that's what matters!

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Recording comedic death gurgles in the VO booth at Futureworks. The dark environment really helped me get into character!

Having recorded my gurgles at 192kHz, I had considerable flexibility with regard to pitch shifting at the edit stage. I processed the gurgles by pitching them +1 semitone up and applying a generous amount of distortion before then running them through Krotos Audio's Simple Monsters plug-in. This made the gurgle sounds I recorded feel considerably more alien, gross and wet sounding.

Rustles

As the Evil Spit Plant is an organic creature, I wanted to include some natural, organic sounds in with the highly-processed and alien-sounding vocal layers to balance them out. The plant's death animation involves a lot of shaking and writhing around, so I thought including a rustling grassy layer to the death sound would help make the enemy feel more believable and grounded in the reality of the game world. I used some grass rustle samples from the Sonniss  Game Audio GDC 2018 bundle as the sounds for this layer.

Impacts

Finally, the impact layer was to act as the sound for plant's body hitting the ground as it dies. I used some recordings I had made during a recent trip to a nature reserve of hitting grass and other bits of foliage with my hands (yep, it looked really stupid but once again it sounded pretty good) as the sounds for this layer.

Wwise Implementation

The screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts were then imported into Wwise as separate layers, with each layer having its own dedicated random container. These random containers were then inserted into the Event_EvilSpitPlant_Death event as separate play actions.

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The Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_Death event in my Wwise session. Each layer of the sound has its own random container, with voice volume and pitch offset randomisation applied. Independent delay settings on the play actions were set so as to give the collective death sound a nice unified rhythm.

With all the sounds integrated into Wwise at this point, I then applied a flanger effect to the scream and gurgle layers via the sound's Enemy_EvilSpitPlant actor mixer to accentuate the creepy, poison-filled nature of the creature even more.

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I didn't want the flanger effect applied to the organic rustle and impact sounds, so I bypassed the effect on these layers. So, without further ado, here's the final Evil Spit Plant Death sound - voilà!

Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_Death Event