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Audio for Games sizes. Working from largest to smallest, Hain- er ensured that each creature sounded appropriately sized. "It's easier to make something sound smaller," he says. "You can always take away layers. If everything sounds huge, then the bigger creatures don't feel that much bigger. Getting the scale of the creatures was step one." Next, Hainer looked at the animations The Sims 3 Showtime allows players to be DJs, singers, magicians and acrobats — each has their own sounds. that play on top of loop beds to have it always moving around you. There is always life. There are always birds or creatures squawking in the distance, and we have smart EQ fall-offs and reverb and echo when you're in an alley. All of these things just hap- pen at runtime based on the game data we're getting. When there is nothing around you but woods, we have a lot of sounds that come up. They don't come up in volume, but they come up in importance, in their priority level. They create a really sick bed of ambi- ence. As you play, and combat or some event happens, the ambience falls off the priority list. The big combat event sounds take over. So you get this ebb and flow of sound going on around you." Guild Wars 2 includes underwater zones, where players can explore and engage in combat. To create the underwater sounds, Ackley modified existing sounds and also created new sounds to match the new underwater combat skill sets. "We have run- time EQ, a low-pass filter, for lopping off the top end of sounds that carried over, like chat- ter and voices. Along with that, we have bubbles tied to your movement and breath- ing, and we also play additional underwatery, bubbly, droney sounds. Also, when you go underwater, you get an entirely different skill set. These combat skills are all made to spe- cifically sound like they're underwater, so impacts and swipes and swings, they're all pre-made for that environment." Cady took charge of recording the under- water Foley. "Drew actually put a condom over the microphone and put it in his Jacuzzi at home. All of our swimming and bubbly movements came from Drew." For several of the non-talking combat creatures in the game, Ackley turned to supervising sound designer Greg Hainer, who owns and operates LA's Scorpio Sound (www.scorpiosound.com). Hainer's approach started by creating a map of the creatures' 32 Post • March 2012 and drawings to develop a series of sounds for each creature. Each series contained small and large attack sounds, small and large pain reactions, and the death sequence. "I could do several variations, from three sec- onds to five seconds to seven seconds of a small attack and a large attack, and as long as the length was within the time they were shooting for, the sound would match what- ever animation they had. So the actual attack animation might change, but the sound would still work for it." In contrast, the death animations were very specific and detailed. Some creatures might die dramatically while others might just fall over dead. Again, Hainer created several different sounding versions of each death sequence. "Even if the animation stayed the same, it would sound different each time the creature died. Some creatures would have an alternate death animation and I would make different sound variations for those as well." It was important that each creature had an emotional range to its character. This helped to clarify if the creature was being hit hard or soft, or if the attack was small or large. "It was challenging at times to get that variety of emotional reactions. When some- thing gets hit, it has to screech or do some- thing to show pain, but they all have to sound different. If it was just using a person's voice, it's easier because you can have someone perform a range of reactions, but it's not like I had these creatures to poke and prod to get them to react, and because it's animation, they had to sound even more expressive." Hainer listened to the sounds of everyday objects in an effort to find emotional ele- ments he could layer into the creature sounds. "You have to be able to hear person- ality in different animal sounds, or metal screeches, or cappuccino machines. I listen for personality and emotion so I can grab that essence and mix it in with other sounds to create an expression, or make it say some- thing, like an 'ouch' sound. It gets to be a little surreal sometimes." There are several different playable races in Guild Wars 2. Each race has its own region, with a distinct sound set. For example, The Charr race is industrial, while the Sylvari race is very plant-based, so their regional sound www.postmagazine.com sets differ. Ackley applied this concept to the voices as well. "We are working with the voices to get them to sound different for each race," he says. "For example, the Charr are big and burley, so we are adding low-end gravely kind of stuff to their voices. We are working on the Sylvari race now. We want them to sound plant-like, and so we're doing stuff like taking impulses from reeds, and try- ing to use that on the voices. We are trying to get it to a point where you'll be able to hear a race's voice and be able to tell which one it is without even seeing it." There is a lot of dialogue in Guild Wars 2, and since each race receives its own unique vocal treatment, that created a lot of vocal processing work. Ackley and crew used a proprietary time saving tool, dubbed the 'Concatenator,' created by their sound engi- neer Robert Gay. According to Ackley, "The Concatenator merges wav files of like formats into a single 'concatenated' file, creates a csv file that holds the file name, length, added silence, etc., and allows one to easily import/export the files using Nuendo. When processing the different vocal treatments for each race, we can do all the things we can do in Nuendo, which is quite a lot when employing Reaktor and side chains, and then export those files right back out to a folder that's exactly the same as it was before, except now, we've done all the vocal processing." From the sweeping soundtrack, created by game composer Jeremy Soule, to the most quiet forest environments, every sound in Guild Wars 2 is strategically designed to engage the player. "My big push is to get the Guild Wars 2 universe to be a believable space," says Ackley. "As magical as it is to see and be in, when you're in it, the immersion comes from feeling like you're in a place that could actually exist. It might be a planet far, far away but it needs to feel like it could exist in order to really be immersed in it." THE SIMS 3 SHOWTIME Robi Kauker, senior audio director in The Sims studio at EA (www.ea.com/the-sims-3), has been involved with The Sims over the past 12 years. For sound effects, voice and music creation, Kauker wanted to make the most of their audio opportunities in the game. "The Sims is a unique world where the users have more control than the designers in most cases because they build their own houses, their own people. They build every- thing in the game. My role is to really make sure we're taking advantage of what audio can bring to the game inside the frame work of The Sims environment."