Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/283421
www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2014 29 Grand Theft Auto games, but Saints Row IV takes everything to the extreme. From story- line, to weapon choices and superpowers, to character dialog, there is only one word to describe Saints Row IV: crazy! Bray says, "Our two mantras for Saints Row are: 'embrace the crazy,' and 'fun trumps all.' If it's not fun, we're not going to put it in the game." Saints Row IV is nominated for a Game Developers Choice Award for Best Audio. Saints Row IV introduces superpowers, aliens and other sci-fi elements that were never part of the franchise. There's an incred- ible sandbox of toys available to players that reinforce the feeling of power, and what Bray terms as "badassery." An example of available superhuman abilities include: Blast, the ability to freeze people and smash them into a mil- lion frozen pieces; Telekinesis, the ability to pick up and throw cars and people; and Stomp, a foot stomp that creates an acute earthquake. Stomp was one of the first sounds Bray created for the game. "When you lift your leg up, it's this reverby, high-pitched zip sound," says Bray. "And that's all it is, a bunch of processed zippers to give you this ascension before you stomp your foot down and cause hell." Saints Row IV offers a variety of new, and creative weapons such as: the Inflato-Ray, the Black Hole Gun, the Abducto-Matic, the Dis- integrator Rifle, and the Dubstep Gun. The business end of the Dubstep Gun looks like a speaker. When fired, it makes all pedestrians and vehicles in the area dance in time to the music. Bringing the gun from concept to real- ity required the audio, art, weapons design, and programming to all work in sync. The main obstacle for audio, notes Bray, was how to trigger the visual effects in tempo with the music. "It was actually a rela- tively simple answer because we had done something similar on Saints Row: The Third," says Bray. They embedded markers as meta- data into the wave file. Those markers have different names, such as rifle and cannon. The smaller rifle visual effects fire out of the tweeter and the cannon has larger effects that come out of the woofer. Depending on the marker name, it would do different things via the code. "You pull the trigger and it would start playing music. The music is what triggers everything else in the world to happen," Bray explains. In addition to the visual effects, the markers also trigger other things, like the sur- rounding lights to flicker, the cars to bounce up and down, and the pedestrians to pop and lock as they dance. "It turns into this giant rave party and what better type of music to kill people with than dub step," he jokes. The Disintegrator Rifle makes people disintegrate into 1s and 0s. To create the sound, Bray used processed bird screeches, metal scrapes, synth elements, and tons of processing. "It was a lot of synth tones that I ran through plug-ins from GRM Tools, as well as Serato Pitch n' Time Pro," says Bray. "I used modulators, phasers and frequency shifters. I was going for that Lawnmower Man, digitizing, bit-crushing kind of sound." Bray describes the sound as "a sci-fi falcon getting punched in the face." According to Bray, Watkins and his audio team at Warner Bros. Game Audio did the majority of the weapon sounds. One new feature of Saints Row IV is the ability to customize weapons. Changing the look of the weapon changes the sound. For exam- ple, you can make the rocket launcher look like a guitar case. "One of my sound design- ers here, Mitch Osias, used an out of tune guitar strum along with the shot, so when you fire the RPG you get this nice twang," Watkins notes. Since there are aliens in Saints Row IV, Wat- kins and his team created sounds for the alien arsenal as well. "The alien weapons that Bryan and the Warner Bros. team did were abso- lutely fantastic," says Bray. "We had these 'murder-bots,' which were our Terminator-esk aliens. They had mini guns and mine launchers, and those sounds were so awesome." Watkins' approach to weapons typically starts with metallic or sci-fi sounds to which he adds real sounding weapons for size and power. He used S-Layer by Twisted Tools to blend and manipu- late sounds to create inter- esting sci-fi palettes. S-Layer is built for Native Instru- ments' Reaktor 5. "We would take the sounds we made with S-Lay- er and start adding them to the weapon we were trying to build," says Watkins. "That's how we did a lot of the sci-fi-type weapons. S-Layer was sor t of the magic tool for this game." "We also built our UI and interface audio using S-Lay- er," adds Bray. "That program was used throughout the game for certain. It's a fantas- tic software." The giant Warden alien vocalizations were performed by actors who specialize in creature voices. Watkins also performed various screams for the Warden aliens. He pitched down his vocals using Serato's Pitch 'n Time Pro and layered it with sounds of gorillas, buffalo, pigs, lightning bolts, and metal clashes to make a big booming roar for the Warden. Watkins says, "The alien Wardens were fun because they were more animalistic. They didn't speak English; they just made noises. They had to sound scary but not cartoony. We wanted people to be frightened by them." Warner Bros. Game Audio hired Joshua Warner Bros. Game Audio's Bryan Watkins. Stormy Weather on Super 35mm and HD StormStock® The world's premier storm footage library. (817) 276-9500 www.stormstock.com