Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
108 M PS E . O R G or a rough idea for something—one of the references for Bile Titan's vocalizations was just one of our studio doors creaking. Were any game states particularly challenging? HS: I think at the extreme end of the scale, our worst-case scenario was having around 100 enemies on screen or in the vicinity and needing to make sure everything important could still be easily heard. The Automaton enemies naturally had a more transient, momentary style of sound design due to their ballistic-style weapon fire, one shot at the time. This provides a natural opportunity for transparently handling the ducking of other sounds out of the way, only momentarily to cover the transient of the weapon fire, and likewise the other way around if needed. A great challenge was having non- momentary, more legato-style sounds from vocalizations of the insect creatures known in-game as Terminids. There's no short, momentary sounds associated with their vocals usually, so ducking other sounds out of the way for the entire duration of that sound's envelope proves harder to deal with, especially when there are many of them around you. Taking a more gentle approach to these proved to be the most effective way to deal with the longer envelope of the sounds, which itself is a compromise but often there is no perfect solution in such scenarios. For dialogue editing—any special editorial approaches for radio/ helmet-futzed lines? Did your editors rely on batching large amounts of files? Were there large sections of dialogue that were cobbled together in the game engine or did the dialogue editors accomplish this task prior to implementation? BS: In Creative Art's approach to dialogue editorial, we prioritize quality and consistency over speed. Unlike the common practice of batch processing audio files, which often involves using compression to level out to a standard LUFS L-R: The tide of combat can turn at a moment's notice, and so too must the audio mix to accommodate for rapid changes in intensity.