The purpose of this part of the assignment was to research and investigate audio in different games, the following is my research about audio and some existing games and how they go about exploring sounds.
Charles Deenen the audio director of the Need for Speed
Charles Deene talks about the techniques the used on the game to enhance the players experience to provide realism/emotion with sound. Firstly Charles goes on to talk about how they have tried different types of methods, one of them was to make the experience go towards a movie by focusing on sound mixing, while the other method was to involve a more natural and real life car experience. Also Charles talks that there is elements within the game that made the player less aware of audio as part of the game, and that the more audio working together with the experience, the better the result, therefore the moment the player notices audio, it starts to work against the game experience, I understand it as Charles wanted the audio to be balanced with the game play, you don’t want that the layer of audio over taking the smooth gameplay, so instead of focusing on the latest and cool audio techniques, they have gone to the basics, the goal is that users won’t notice the audio (while playing on fantastic developed graphics) but the moment they play the game on silent, they notice that their experience is diminishing greatly.
Furthermore, Charles Deenen talks about how he worked with Fast and Furious and learned new techniques in order to enhance sounds, he mentions that he learned how to create the emotion of car sounds projected and combined by other sounds. I never thought of this, and it does sound interesting, he mentions that they used a plethora of bears, pigs, tigers, leopards to enhance cars, he mentions that Need for speed, they start of recordings with cars as a base, and enhance them with other layers. So this makes me understand that putting multiple layers into a recording can create a really fantastic effect for audio.
In addition, Charles goes on to talk about how they recorded all the features that involved to do with cars, so for example, the engine, skid noises, impacts, crashes etc, he says most of the recordings are done on a track , with dyno recordings. I was amazed by the fact he said they had recorded 150+ cars, anything from a regular car to a high end 1 million dollar race car and that you will always find new experiences and sounds. What’s more, for the game Need for speed, they added a mode which was a craze in Japan called “Touge” involving going through mountains roads really fast and drifting. In order to reproduce these sounds, they hooked up with touge driver and recorded a lot of reference material.
Moreover, besides doing skid recording, road surfaces, bumps, turbos etc, they really enjoyed recording crashes, the most complicated one has been the hiring of a construction crane, dropping about 15 cars a day from 100 foot down, recording crashes from all types of cars, vans and cement blocks.
NEED FOR SPEED HOT PERSUIT
The 2010 PlayStation 3 edition of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit revolves around high-speed car chases through winding countryside highways and bustling village streets, giving players license to drive as both escaping speedsters and pursuing police. The game is played in the large, open-world of fictional Seacrest County, which features coastal, desert, forest, and mountain regions for diverse driving challenges.
Throughout this gameplay, as I watched, there is many sounds being involved in just one race; the atmosphere is rapid and furious.
There are backgrounds sounds constantly of police cars chasing the racers, and also throughout the race sounds such a helicopter was brought in the gameplay.
It invokes you too rushing in a race, trying to flee from a police chase.
NEED FOR SPEED THE RUN
Anatomy of a scene
Need for speed the run, takes place in a Fictional city, illegal race, it’s not just a casual race, every second counts in the race, so audio really brings scenes to life, you can have fantastic visuals and graphics but then how do you bring that to life through sound? Need for speed wanted to nail the different geography you will be racing through, so for example, the sounds that are in the desert and mountains will be different to the ones in a busy city.
Specifically for the sounds, “For the Run” Game play, he says they needed to make the audio a little more human, it’s so important trailer come to life, when they create the cars in game then when sound come In It’s a big deal, the cars are the stars of the show.
Each car Is recorded on average between 8 – 12 mics, course there’s the exhaust. As you can see some Images below, the need for speed sound developers used real life car to generate their sounds.
RED DEAD REDEMPTION
As I was reading the interview of audio director Jeffrey Whitcher, he mentions the game developers since the beginning of the game had the mentality of setting the whole theme of the game in an old western. So of course they needed to cover graphics and importantly sounds to this western theme gameplay as much as possible. He also mentions that the art department did a fantastic job in sketching out images in great detail, so that also made the audio team drive even further into working much harder on the sound tracks.
During the development of Red dead redemption, Jeffrey mentions that they had the advantage of working with facilities from Rockstar north, so both games GTA & RDR had some similar gameplay. They had the possibilities of achieving the sounds-capes and atmosphere feelings, it became flexible for them, and they achieved a greater level of detail. They focused on western ambience’s for the game such as animals, birds, even little bugs and of course things like the time of the day and weather.
Furthermore, Jeffrey goes on to talk about how the gameplay would be approached with the atmosphere and backgrounds for this wild west landscape, He says that they had look at it from a western perspective, the feelings of the place, the type of wild life that inhabited the place and apply this with audio. In Jeffreys case his task was to design a kind of creepy place. He says they had to collaborate his design, for e.g, a swamp, insects, frogs and combine that with some unpleasant sounds, of course not to repel the game player, but just to set the atmosphere alive. JW goes on to talk about how he wanted the gameplay to be designed with fun and creative audio wherever the game player would be in each area, he says it’s wonderful to have music through and through, but they wanted something extra to increase the excitement, he tells that by having different type of sounds, you are setting different experiences. So if you have a rooster in the morning you have a peaceful audio picture, however if you hear crows or jackdaws it could have a nervouse audio impact.
Jeffrey goes on to talk about how the sound mix for Red dead redemption was approached and they type of implementation tools were used, the main audio tools they used were Wavelab, Sound forge, Native instrument programs (Which I’ve never heard of), however he also said it was crucial that the audio programmers had support for you, it a fantastic thing to create a great piece of audio, but then putting that into the game play and getting that flawless sound behaviour was a major part of completing ones design. The audio programmers were great at the finishing points using Pro tools & Reaktor, adapting various behaviours and modulation to realize the desires sound, in order to maintain everything balanced.
Jeffrey speaks that when it came to the final steps in balancing the sounds, the three main aspects of the sounds track were, speech, effects and music. You do not want your game to have a flat audio throughout the whole game; you want to give the player a variety of experience that really breathes different levels of movements, because that’s what a game is all about, many things can happen at different time that affect how sound behaves.
kc | luis meneses 