1 Chronicles 2 Audio

[Roshan Fried]

Anepic podcast with a brilliant plot, great narration and an amazing cast! An audio drama (rather than a "mere" audio book) indeed. Thank you, Christof, and the entire LC team and cast for all the work you have done to provide your listeners with so much high-class entertainment!...

Spring and summer times are vibrant seasons in Japan; birds are very active, but what is really noticeable from a sound point of view during these seasons is insects. Millions of cicadas during the day and crickets during the night saturate the Japanese landscape with their song. What many travellers to Japan do not realize is that the various species have very specific song types as well as very specific locations in which they live. This means if you travel from southern Japan up to Tokyo and then north to Tohoku, you will be able to hear different insect sounds. And the insect sounds will also change from season to season. Once I realized this, I was able to watch a Japanese movie and identify where it was filmed and what time of year it was, if there were insect sounds.

We often ask our audience to spend hours inside our game worlds, and we design complex terrain with various biome types. Yet, sometimes we craft the audio for these environments with much less detail than the visuals. I wanted to not only add more life to the world of Gemea, but to create a living world that would highlight the changes of day and night, summer and winter, sunshine and storm.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles includes sounds of over 40 species of birds, insects, and frogs. Did I go overboard with this? Perhaps. But the result is a world that has a dynamic ecology which reflects various states of change. Each choice and its implementation is also designed to support the overall narrative of exploring the land of Gemea.

Palette

As a starting point, I wanted to select as broad a range of content as possible. I have a massive SFX collection as well as my own personal recordings. I have also recently been working on restoring some older recordings and making them suitable for game implementation purposes. Working through sound recordings is like selecting which instruments you want to compose for. Each sound has character, texture, and a quality that suits certain emotional states. Selecting the most suitable cicada sound is no less important than choosing which wind instrument to write a solo for.

When it came to selecting the second pass content, I knew the biomes very well and I knew what I wanted. I would go through my raw SFX material, often not looking at the names, and I would listen with an open mind. I would allow the sound to take me wherever it would. Some sounds were lush and full of life, others seemed sparse, and some would invoke a feeling of hot, dry, arid landscapes. In most instances this is because the sounds were from a creature that lived in the appropriate environment in the real world, but instead of working with names and descriptions, I worked with feelings, and I think this allowed for some nice choices of content.

From a seasonal point of view, I set many birds to be most active in springtime, when many creatures are mating, then slightly less active in summer and in some biomes completely replaced with noisy summer insects. In some regions, the same bird species are active through spring, summer, and autumn, and then they fall quiet during the cold winter. In other biomes, a specific bird may only be active in spring, and then through other months different birds or insects become more vocal.

The advantage of the Wwise State system is that I could easily assign and tune each species object to be unique, but also, so they would blend and dovetail nicely. The other useful implementation technique was to add all my biome specific sound objects into a single Event. The main game objects I used for implementation into Unity were the biome specific trees. Each biome had its own tree species. As birds and insects generally gather in trees, this was logical from a narrative point of view and provided objects spread throughout the game world, as emitters. This also meant I had to sync only one Event to a tree prefab and it would be instanced across the whole world. (This was important because the player can collect plant seeds and place them anywhere else in the world.)

Initially, I had both a bird Event and an insect Event attached to each tree prefab. Then I realized I could simplify this. A Wwise Event can contain multiple sound objects. So I could place each of the different bird and insect species which I wanted to inhabit a biome into a single Event, and attach that to a tree prefab. The State system meant that even though there might have been 4-6 sound objects in the one Event, each would only play at the specific day/night and seasonal State defined for it. Each of these objects could have unique effect and attenuation behaviour. So again, the drop-off range of species could all be tuned to present unique behaviour within the world.

As you walk through the world, there is a true spatial environment around you. Trees may include two or three different species of birds within them, and each species had a range of bird calls. So, the entire system generates a spatial dynamic environment. If you chop down a harvestable tree, it stops emitting its related sounds. If you deforest an entire biome, its environmental audio will reflect this.

Each biome also has birds in flight. These are very basic animated shapes. But they also have sounds attached to them, so they sporadically emit a bird call as they fly by. This final element really helped to sell the feeling of a dynamic and living world.

Making the audience feel cold in the winter months and in snow biomes, and hot and dry in the desert, can be achieved more successfully when the audio fully supports the visual effects. In fact, often the audio can be more evocative and can trigger emotional feelings from the audience, more than visual changes can. Keep in mind that apart from the basic flying bird shapes, none of these birds or insects exist in the game as objects, they only exist as sounds. So the world is vastly populated with a great and diverse selection of lifeforms that exist only because of the audio. In this regard I got to decide and create much of the ecosystem of the world of Gamea, and this helped create a lush environment without having to create dozens of models and lots of complex code.

Stephan Schtze has worked within game audio production for close to twenty years. He is a composer, sound designer, location recorder and spatial audio practitioner. The broad and varied list of audio production skills Stephan has developed over his career, and his experience working with some of the leading companies in New Reality technology provided him with the perfect opportunity to create the first book on audio production techniques for this newly evolving technology.

What best describes you? What best describes you? Audio DirectorSound DesignerAudio ProgrammerAudio EngineerRecording EngineerAudio Integration SpecialistComposerProducer / DirectorCEO / Studio DirectorLead Software EngineerSoftware EngineerGame DesignerStudent / InternTeacherITOther

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