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March 2015

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www.postmagazine.com 31 POST MARCH 2015 soundtracks he crafts. From AAA to mobile games, Aitken seeks to raise the bar for game audio. "Where I want to go with mobile game audio is to have it treated like another headline format," says Aitken. And he's in good company as far as game developers are concerned. He's been working with Kwalee — a developer and publisher of mobile games based in Leamington Spa, England. According to Aitken, Kwalee is a company "full of big leaguers, massively experienced with AAA titles. What they're aiming at is slightly ahead of the technology curve. They want to have AAA games on mobile devices, with a quality and interaction on par with console games." Aitken's first experience with Kwalee was on Farm Fighters — a turn-based shooting game with farm animals. Aitken came in at the end of the project and only tweaked the sounds already designed for the game. "It was interesting to see what a non-audio person did with sound," notes Aitken. "There was little adherence to loudness quality, no real balancing." According to Aitken, the audio imple- mentation for Farm Fighters was very straightforward and didn't involve middle- ware. When a specific action happened, a specific sound would play. In contrast, Aitken's second project with Kwalee, the upcoming Wave Champions, is much more sophisticated. Wave Champions, to be released later this year, is a boat racing game where players can draw their own race courses and challenge random opponents online. Unlike the simple sound effect approach for Farm Fighters, Wave Champions is designed to give players an audio expe- rience. "I really pay attention to balanc- ing game audio because it is a dynamic medium and so you have to use dynamic changes," explains Aitken, who used mid- dleware by Tazman-Audio called Fabric that works with the Unity game engine and allows independent audio designers to easily integrate their audio assets into a game. "Middleware engines are becoming ubiquitous," adds Aitken. With Fabric, he was able to create side chain loops, giving certain sounds precedence over others. For example, in Wave Champions, collision sounds take precedence over every other sound in the mix. All side chained sound elements are turned down, and the colli- sion sound dominates the mix. In addition to a dynamic mix, Wave Champions' highly-detailed soundtrack features custom recordings of boat engines. Aitken captured sounds from small hover crafts, Sea Doos, jet boats and swamp boats. "There is a whole load of engine detail in there. I recorded various boat engines, cut all the sounds, and re-integrated them so they work in a fair- ly-interactive manner," says Aitken. To cre- ate a wide variety of collision sounds from a small amount of discrete sounds, Aitken added meta-tags on all the sounds, then built a collision engine to trigger one water sound, one plastic sound, and one concrete sound (since the boat has a plastic hull, it's hitting something made of concrete, and it's on the water) to make a unique collision. "If you have a pool of 10 sounds for each, then what you essen- tially have is 10x10x10. Now you have 1,000 variations for the collisions. I also have metal objects, wooden objects, big wooden objects, small wooden objects, grass — I've only stored about 100 sounds but there are a couple hundred thousand possibilities that could be generated," says Aitken. He notes that he's done that process for nearly all the sounds in Wave Champions, except for the engines. Engine sounds require long sound samples, and therefore, are big files. If Wave Champions were a console game, Aitken would consider using a parti- cle-based, granular synthesis system like REV from Crankcase to reproduce the engine sounds instead of relying on sound samples. "Phones just aren't powerful enough. Also, we don't have the budget like we would on an AAA game title at this moment," states Aitken. For loudness metering on mobile games, Aitken uses NuGen Audio's VisLM. He follows the Sony non-manda- tory guideline of -16dB, which he notes, is the mastering level used for iTunes. Loudness is a big issue for mobile games, says Aitken, "If you want to start creating quality games for mobile devices than the sound mandate has to sit within tolerable, professional levels. If the sound is distort- ed then it sounds amateur." He explains that every element of a game adds two percent to the overall picture. "Not having your graphics slightly anti-aliasing, making sure that when you collide with some- thing you stop, making sure when you hit something the sound isn't late, making sure the buttons feel like they're pressing when you press them. Those things on their own won't make or break a game, but your whole team has to add that two percent to go from an average game, 50 percent, to 80 percent at least. If I can add, with the total audio budget, an addi- tional six percent to the score, then that's great. That's fantastic. We can go from a B to an A-, on just the audio alone." OUT THERE: OMEGA EDITION Award-winning composer Siddhartha Barnhoorn, located in Katwijk aan Zee, Netherlands (www.sidbarnhoorn.com), scored over 70 films, and has a growing list of game credits, including the score for the highly-acclaimed, first-person puz- zler Antichamber, developed by Alexan- der Bruce, and the well-received strategy game Out There by Mi-Clos Studio. Out There was Barnhoorn's first experience creating sound design for a mobile game, since the developers desired him to handle both sound design and music. Creatively, Barnhoorn wanted the sound design integrated into the music, "so the sound design wasn't just random sounds," he explains. "I wanted to create a flow between the soundtrack and the sound design elements." Out There is a non-combat space strat- egy game that requires players to explore MOBILE GAME AUDIO Siddhartha Barnhoorn used an EBow when recording guitar parts for Out There: Omega Edition. CONTINUED ON PG 44

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