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GAME SOUND PRODUCTION


Sign up for your digital AM at www.audiomedia.com Game Audio Horror Samuel Justice


John Broomhall talks with sound designer Samuel Justice about creating standout audio for horror game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.


ACCORDINGTOdeveloper The Chinese Room’s website, survival horror game Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, is “a terrifying journey into madness, industrialisation, and the darkest secrets of the soul” – rich pickings for sound designer Samuel Justice, who admits some of the ‘no punches pulled’ horror scenarios put him off his breakfast as he perused the concept docs. Meanwhile, though his creative appetite was challenged by some significant game engine limitations he was nevertheless determined to make sure Pigs’ audio would be stand out… “I played through a lot of games – focusing on implementation and the way sound reacted around the environment. Many titles rely heavily on real-time systems (reverbs, occlusions, effects, etc) but some have idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies – and can be prescriptive about how you approach things. I was getting a little tired of ‘one size fits all’ game audio solutions – I wanted to do something as different as possible.


32 November 2013 “Our engine had only basic


functionality. Achieving the ‘realistic’ sound the game has become known for was thanks to a happy accident. Early in pre-production we were testing levels and there was a scenario in which a small ‘jump-scare’ event took place (a valve popping off a pipe in a large hall). I made a positional mono sound and, unhappy that it didn’t reflect the environment properly, I sent it to a reverb and created a separate wide stereo reverb- only sound. I scripted the reverb sound to trigger simultaneously with the mono one, but set the stereo file as ‘non-directional’ – so it surrounded the player. This worked fantastically – the mono sound telling the player exactly where the sound was originating from, and the reverb telling the ‘story’ of the environment. With the game so linear and having such tight control, I was able to go further and delay the left reverb channel by 50ms for a slap-back effect, as the left wall was much further away than


the right. It was a simple blend of mono and stereo files but achieved exactly what I wanted. I suddenly had a simple, easily tweak-able solution that sounded far more expensive and high budget than it really was. “I realised I could have absolute control over audio without worrying about the quirks and constraints of other people’s systems. The final sound’s complexity came from the simplicity of the approach! “Another ‘complexity


through simplicity’ solution I stumbled across concerned Foley. I’ve never quite understood why, in first- person games, footsteps and Foley are recorded close mic’d when in fact the player’s ears can be a good 1.5 metres above the sound, with natural dampening from both body and environment. Given the game’s linearity and 90 percent of environments being interior, I could source Foley very simply. Most games define things per material type (metal, dirt, etc). For Pigs, I sourced per space type, so for


a tight reflective corridor I’d find a similar real-life space (matching the surface sound as closely as possible), place the microphone at head height and record. I captured lots of content as I find footsteps in games to be extremely repetitive (each space type has some 50-60 variants per movement – walk, run, sneak, etc). Thanks to the first reflections and body dampening, they fitted perfectly – they just worked without me doing any special treatments. “I also created a library of


horror sounds (granulated whispers, screams, groans) which were pre-processed through various reverbs and filters before implementation into the game. These were layered on top of the ambience giving it texture and an ever- moving feel. I littered the game maps with sound source emitters – points where the sound would play from, and then created a simple piece of script telling the engine to pick


a random time (usually between 10 and 20 seconds) and set off a timer. When that timer had run out, it would choose one of these random points to play the sound from. The timer would then reset and start over while the current sound played. So you’d get a variety of audio from different spatial positions over the ambient bed. It created a lot of movement – there was always something playing behind or to the player’s left or right – but never loud or intrusive. The sounds poked their heads through the mix just enough.” In describing his own audio


vision and approach for Pigs, Justice coins the phrase ‘warped realism’: “I settled on a realistic aesthetic early on (I think it’s easier to choose a simple


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