2018

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School of Video Game Audio - Monster Sounds

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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!

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.

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.

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!

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School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Effects Processing

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My second assignment on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course was to record a selection of dry footstep sounds, and then use effects processing in Wwise to simulate how they would sound when played back in a set of different acoustic environments.

I recorded my concrete and grass footsteps using the Foley pits of the Avid S6 studio in Futureworks. I also recorded some gravel surface steps in my backyard at night, but didn't grab any pictures of that session as it was pretty dark!

Using auxiliary buses in the Master/Mixer hierarchy, I routed a collection of footstep recordings to a variety of effect chains that modeled a corridor/passageway, an open exterior environment and a forest area. Specifically, these environments were a passageway and an outdoor section from the AkCube FPS game, and the opening forest environment from Playdead's Limbo.

Here's how my Wwise footstep events sounded with effects processing:

On reflection, the reverb I chose for the corridor sounds way too extreme, and the forest reverb has a high-end ringing element to it which doesn't sound right for the environment. I also should have tried to get the correct reverb sound using just a single reverb, but at the time using a pair of reverbs seemed to create a less boxy reverberation sound that I quite liked. Still, I'm pleased that I now know how to hook up my sounds to effects using aux sends in Wwise.

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School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Footstep Implementation

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My first assignment on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course was to implement footstep sounds into a blank Wwise project in three different ways.

The first task involved creating a footstep play event that would alternate sounds between the left and right foot. To do this, I filled two random containers with the sounds for the left and right footsteps, set them to shuffle, and then made them both children of a parent sequence container. With this sequence container plugged into the target object slot of the play action on the Play_Part1_Footstep event, the event would then swap between the left and right foot sounds each time it was called.

The second task involved separating each footstep sound into discrete heel and toe segments so that they could be triggered by specific key frames of a character's walk animation. This involved creating a Footsteps switch container, which contained separate heel and toe sequence containers for each foot, and four switch groups that corresponded to each of these containers. This way, as the character walks, the game can make calls for specific footstep sounds and Wwise will randomly select an appropriate sound from the appropriate container.

I later learned that a much simpler solution to this challenge was to instead use two switch containers and two switches. One switch container can be set up to contain the left and right heel random containers, while the other contains the left and right toe containers. This way, you then only need to have two switches, left and right, for the game to be able to select which set of footstep sounds should be playing, rather than having to make switches for each part of both feet.

The third part of the assignment was to create a play footstep event that would alternate between left and right feet and play toe-heel sections concurrently without using a switch container. I achieved this using a series of nested sequence containers.

Once again I later discovered that a more elegant solution to using multiple sequence containers was to simply use multiple play actions within the Play_Part3_Footstep event.

Two play actions are used here to get the heel and toe components to play back within the Play_Part3_Footstep. A slight delay has been added to the toe component so that it plays back just after the heel sound.

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School of Video Game Audio - Wwise 101: AkCube Game Shotgun Sounds Implementation

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Here's a quick video I made after completing the first two sections of the Wwise 101 materials. I implemented sounds for an FPS shotgun blast animation in Wouter Van Oortmerssen's AkCube game, including pump in/out and scattering shell sounds. I used delays on the SFX objects and random containers in the Fire_Shotgun_Player event so that the sounds play in sync with the shotgun firing animation.