Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
56 I m ps e . o rg BS: It had to do with Evan and Christophe's leadership. And of course, Amy Hennig. Uncharted was her vision. She created Drake and obviously casting Nolan North was huge; they worked great together. The sound part of it was just making sure that it supported where she was going. EM: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is an absolute masterpiece and the audio work was as well. The train sequences, including the very opening of the game and later when Nate is on top of a moving train, were so innovative. How did you all go about creating those sequences? PK: The opening train sequence was the second thing I worked on. We really wanted to get this sense of impending danger, because the player wasn't sure exactly what was happening. You're thrown into the situation and had to make your way up the train, so we wanted the train to be this monster that could fall apart at any time and spell the end of Drake. We spent a lot of time crafting all the moans, tones, creaks, and things falling apart. We tried to have it always increasing and this breathing motion as you're going up the train, which crescendoed into this tricked-out cinematic moment as you were jumping off the train. I spent a lot of time on that with Bruce trying to get the feel right. When it worked, a lot of people at the studio were like, "Oh, okay, so this is what we're doing." That had a lot of buy-in for what we were trying to achieve for the title moving forward. BS: Yeah, you really got that groany, precarious feeling of "it could just all come apart." Naughty Dog was doing a lot with play stages (trains, ships, etc.) that moved through space, so all the associated game object positions had to be updated every frame. It was complicated because if that stuff got out of sync, the listener could suddenly be outside of a filter region and cause all kinds of discontinuities. For the train sequence, we put emitters on lots of the structures the train could pass: trees, poles, waterfalls, farms, etc. If you're standing on the train and the objects went by, you'd hear a whoosh. We had these trellis bridges that you went through and we added a staccato sequence of fluttery air disturbance. There were crossing lights and bells that would go by. What's funny is it didn't matter if there was a visual crossing, we just added them anyway and they would be coming hot and heavy (laughs). We dopplered them, so Jonathan had to add doppler code to the engine. The train cars or compartments had carefully fitted filter volumes to semi-occlude external sounds. We used blend primitives for the windows and the doors. It was tricky because you could traverse the top of the train, break a skylight and drop down into the interior of the car. All the sounds had to transition in a natural way. We put emitters on the couplings; they make a lot of sound. So when you'd go out and climb on the side of the car, and go from car to car, they would become more prominent. Also, the train would sometimes speed up and slow down a little bit. It was hard to tell visually, so to sell that we used the clacks that happen when the wheels roll over track segment joins, the places where they joined them, there's a "ka-kak." We would play those but we would change the interval between them using the train speed, so if the train sped up, they'd clack more often and if it slowed down, they'd do it less often. I remember thinking that if you're standing on top of this train, it's going to be so windy, and nothing else is going to play. So I got the idea to not play the wind as hard there but to do more cloth flutter so that it didn't just swamp the mix. PK: Bruce mentioned that this was the start of indoor versus outdoor, which really came through on The Last of Us more. And it was the start of "How many pieces of metadata do we add during this game?" So per sound, we can adjust all these bits of metadata which tell the game how to behave in the game and how they should mix in the game, because we didn't really have much mix time in those days. We have weeks now to mix a game; we had hours back in those days. We mixed Uncharted 2 overnight. I think Bruce was working with Amy trying to get the cinematics sorted, and I was just playing through the game with Derrick Espino, trying to pick up all the things we needed to do before they were like, "you must stop!" BS: You had all these ways for that sound to play, its properties and the way it fell off and how it was filtered. If that stuff wasn't set when you put it in, imagine doing thousands and thousands of sounds at the end because you couldn't go through all the metadata and set it. RK: That metadata structure and everything that Bruce is talking about is something that we've carried through, and the ethos and the trust on the team is that you put the sound in the game the way you expect it to play in the shipping product. With The Last of Us Part II, the games are so big and immense now, and there's tens of thousands of sounds that we're dealing with. It's impossible to touch every single one. So there's an immense amount of respect and trust that is given to each designer to mix as we go, as we say, so that when we do come to that final mix process, we can shortcut it in as many ways as we can. We still got to touch stuff, but it's not nearly as much as we might otherwise have to.