BETA | AUDIO SPECIAL // SOUND IN GAMES
Top to bottom: Creative Assembly’s Matt
McCamley and Richard Beddow, Simogo’s Simon Flesser and sound designer Stafford Bawler
Main: Alien: Isolation uses audio to conjure up dark and scary imagery and tap into the player’s subconcious to amplify the tension
Below right: Simogo’s Device 6 picks particular moments when to play sound, so as to expand on the reading experience but not shatter the immersion of the reader
due to technological shackles,” says Creative Assembly and Total War senior audio designer Matt McCamley. “As games tech matures, so does in-game audio, chiefly in the way we can deliver an experience to the player.” One of Creative Assembly’s hotly anticipated titles, Alien: Isolation, is a prime example of how key audio can be in games. The team has had to adopt various new and unique techniques to evoke the original film’s haunting atmosphere and turn it up to ten to keep players on the edge of their seats for its 15-hour or so duration.
And from early footage, the game just wouldn’t be the same without sound. The team’s sound designer Sam Cooper says the game’s audio has been crafted to subtly
conjure up dark and scary imagery on even seemingly mundane objects, tapping into the player’s subconscious, in-built fight-or flight responses. He explains this creates an unpredictable soundscape that will keep users second-guessing what their ears are telling them, moving the experience beyond just twitch-play and how good they are at games. And much of this has been made possible thanks to new consoles and tools. “With additional processing power and frequently updated middleware, we’re now able to use rich convolution reverbs on new-gen consoles and experiment with emerging DSP such as in-game HRTF/binaural processing,” says Cooper. “We’re far less limited by the hardware with new consoles.”
Another CA sound designer, Total War audio manager Richard Beddow, says Rome II marked the first time the studio had used audio engine wwise, as it offered tools for sound designers in terms of how to play back assets assigned to game events, asset containers and shared resources such as DSP settings. This meant that designers could set up new items, previously the realm of coders, thanks to its visual GUI, creating what Beddow says was a more efficient workflow.
Bawler recommends other tools, such as Unity and Fabric, which he says lent themselves to the way he likes to work, creating ordered hierarchies and the careful management of data trees, allowing him to spend more time on the creative elements of audio creation.
MOBILE BEATS Much like Creative Assembly is experimenting with sound implementations in its big budget console and PC outings, mobile is also home to some interesting techniques. Simogo’s Flesser had the tough task of integrating audio, along with composer Daniel Olsén, in interactive story Device 6. The audio had to match the reader’s interpretation, while also not losing their attention by playing sounds at the wrong time.
“We wanted to keep a lot of the things up to the players’ imagination, so it was a tough balance to decide what things that are mentioned in the text should be audible or not,” he explains.
“Creating a sense of space was our biggest priority. So working with footsteps to
16 | JULY 2014
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