Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/115625
audio for games Warner Bros. Post's Bryan Watkins capturing sounds. He calls on the iZotope RX2 plug-in to clean up field recordings. WB Games' Brian Pamintuan used ambience and music to create a sense of movement in Guardians of Middle Earth. 36 Judgment has 24 cinematics, all mixed in 5.1 for nine different languages. There were hundreds of files just for the cinematics alone. Add to that the in-game music, dozens of weapon sounds, ambient battle sounds and other environmentally-triggered effects, ambient dialogue and character Foley, and you have an astronomical amount of sound files, that all have to playback under a memory budget of 40MB. Typically, games will have dedicated audio streaming for music and dialogue. Chunks of audio are pulled off the game disk as needed. For Gears of War this wasn't possible since the graphics had taken up the entire bandwidth of disk streaming. Epic came up with an ingenious solution, says Larson. "In order to fit under the 40MB budget, which was a difficult task, we authored the audio to take advantage of the streaming of maps. We made our own game maps for audio, so it's the maps that are streaming in and out, except that those maps only contain audio information. This way we can separate the audio from the geometry and the other content. We can independently script and control it." The ambient audio and the scripted audio were put into an average of 10 smaller scripted sub-maps. The Level Designers took those scripted audio maps and made sure they streamed into the world at the correct time. The audio embedded into the maps is constantly streaming in and out of memory from the hard drive. The music is also within the scripted audio maps. "The music is actually streamed in and out so efficiently that we only have one or two music tracks in memory at any given moment," says Larson. "In fact, there were times when a map was really tight on memory and we actually had to create unique scripted maps that only contained one music track. This way we could independently script the music to stream in and out independent of the other maps for even more efficiency." Post • March 2013 Post0313_034-37-AudioRAV5FINALREAD.indd 36 GUARDIANS OF MIDDLE EARTH Monolith (www.lith.com), known for games like F.E.A.R. and Condemned, has developed its first MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game, titled Guardians of Middle Earth. Though MOBAs are typically played on a computer, Guardians of Middle Earth is a console game. It was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles in December 2012. Guardians of Middle Earth is part of the Lord of the Rings franchise, so when it came to creating the game's sound, Brian Pamintuan, director of audio at WB Games in Seattle (which owns Monolith), first explored the film's sound to see if there was anything that could be repurposed for the game. It turned out, there really wasn't. Creating film sound is different from the way you would create game assets, so the actual sound design from the film didn't fit the game. Instead, Pamintuan used the film's sound as more of a guideline of what the game should sound like. "We had to stay in the realm of Lord of the Rings, but we pretty much had to start over and make the sounds. It's a game that is very magical, but it's not sci-fi, so that was the direction from the license company, and we had to apply that to the game." The game world of Guardians is static for the most part. Unless you're destroying a tower, interacting with the environment isn't a part of game play. Pamintuan didn't want the world to feel static, though, so he used ambience and music to create a sense of movement. "If you are just standing in the world, I need to feel like the world is actually doing something, that it's actually moving. There isn't weather, or night or day, but with the ambience we made it feel like there is something going on; it's not just one big drone." One concern Pamintuan had for Guardians was that, like other MOBAs, it would sound too repetitive if there were looping music tracks and looping ambience. His goal was to set this MOBA apart from the crowd. Pamintuan worked with Jeremy Soule of Artistry Entertainment, Laura Karpman of Art Farm West, and Inon Zur to create the game music. They used short music cues to act like in-game indicators to highlight character abilities when the player upgraded them, or to signify that a character used a main spell. Also, if a tower is destroyed, a longer music cue will play. "With this type of game, too much music could kill the game experience too. It was a fine line. We used longer music stems and short music cues as opposed to looping the music. We really tried to avoid looping." Another way Pamintuan set Guardians apart from other MOBAs was by using character vocalizations to make the characters feel more alive. The vocalizations also helped the characters stand out in the chaos of battle. He hired actors to sound like the characters from the Lord of the Rings films, such as Gandalf and Gollum. "You see Gandalf and you hear him saying a spell. Or, you see Gollum and hear him and they're commenting back and forth to each other when you're fighting them.The armies you have, the minions, are also commenting back and saying things like, 'Let's go,' as they're running." Without the vocalizations, Pamintuan felt the sound of destruction and music would be too repetitive. To keep players from muting the game's sound in favor of playing their own music, he created multiple variations of the character vocalizations. In addition, an announcer also comments on the game over the cacophony of battle. "Each character has a huge set of lines that will play. There are 10 characters, and more downloadable characters are being added. Including the announcer, there are about 3,000 lines of dialogue." Each character has three main abilities, plus one ultimate ability. Each ability has unique sound design. The ultimate abilities trigger short music cues. The battles max out at five-on-five players. In the most intense battles of five-on-five, with the music, vocalizations, character sound design, battle sounds, and an announcer voice-over, mixing for those situations seemed a bit daunting. "The mix was the number one concern because when we were mixing, we never knew if we should mix it for someone who is playing two on two, or three on three, or do we mix it to the worst case scenario of five on five." After extensive play testing, Pamintuan developed a system of setting the sound priorities based on radius and situation. He also set priorities on the sound elements, with VO being the most important, followed by sound effects related to the character's abilities, then the music, announcer, and finally Foley. "The ducking depends on radius, by how many people are around you, or dependent on the situation. You never know what situations will happen, like a tower could blow up at the same time as four characters are doing their main spells, and then there are vocalizations too. The radius was the key to how we dealt with the mix." Guardians was the first time Pamintuan used Audiokinetic's Wwise instead of proprietary middleware. He structured the sounds so that the VO and music are set to stream- www.postmagazine.com 3/1/13 2:13 PM