WHAT DOES AN ALIEN PLANET SOUND LIKE ANYWAY?
It’s time for another dev blog post and this time, we’re discussing the audio design of NO LOVE LOST! We’ve taken a lot of time to imagine the planet alive within the senses – what does it look like, feel like and in today’s case – sound like! To discuss that process is the mastermind who’s transporting our ears to Drosera — James W. is here to take us through how he made the game’s creature sounds!
SETTING DROSERA’S TONE
When it comes to audio, the project's aesthetic will decide your approach to how you'll design the sound. You can have games where all the sounds need to replicate real world objects, or sometimes you’ll be designing sounds that have nothing tangible to do with the image they'll be made for. With the fantasy world of NO LOVE LOST, we have the opportunity to get extremely creative with the design process since it’s all fiction.
For NO LOVE LOST’s creatures, there are three main types that we needed to design for; enemy creatures we battle, "one shot" creatures that float around our player in the environment that we never see, and then distant background creatures that are mixed into the "bed" sounds for distant ambience. All of these animals have been designed so that nothing is taken straight from planet Earth and unique to our own game's environment.
When creating sounds, there's three main approaches that James likes to use: “There's processing sounds of real animals using sound design software and techniques, on occasion designing sounds with synthesizers, and finally, using your own voice or a voice actor's for performance. I've used all three of these approaches for the creatures in NLL.”
“I look to give creatures personalities, like languages. For this NPC the clicking sounds were my own voice for its vocalizations. I made short, processed squealing sounds out of real world animals, and then added buzzing sounds that I warped to give a bit of weird, sci-fi otherworldliness.
There’s also “one shot” creature sounds that appear randomly off screen moving around the player, and then of course background ambience, where we hear distant sounds including a birdlike one that I made using a synth.”
CONDUCTING THE ATMOSPHERE
The “Worm”, for example, has three main elements to its character: the vocalizations, the toxic spray, and then its body movement when it appears and disappears into the ground.
The Worm’s vocalizations are a mix of animal vocalizations that were twisted up, squished and processed, and then other sounds were designed to bring out the unique personality traits of our fantasy worm!
Lastly, it was important to give the Worm some weight to convey the movement of a large creature. Recordings for these could be things such as recording your vehicle with the engine off, rolling over a rural dirt road. You can then take this recording and process it to make it sound big, and then edit it and add it to other things for the feel of something large moving.
“For the Worm’s toxic spray, I used old foley recordings I’d made with raw chicken and bbq sauce, mixed with other things such as fire and animal breath - all processed and edited to add layers to the spray.”
BRINGING IN THE CRESCENDO
After the sounds have been made, you then have to implement them into the game engine and get them functioning with the creature animations.
There'll be numerous animations that you'll have to design sounds for such as attacks, deaths, etc. There's multiple layers for each sound type and variations of those too. There is also certain parameters to consider, such as volume and pitch, which will be randomized in real time to create the most realistic action sounds.
Next, you’ll add these action sounds to a trigger, before adding this trigger to the animations for each action such as attack or death.