This is the second installment of the development blog on my UDK Demo, you can check out the beginning, part one, by clicking below!
Part One: Conceive, Design, Plan!
Going into this project I was very excited. I had done some sound design before, but not for anything that I would actually get to test and use. Not to mention that the things I was designing for were awesome and I had so many ideas swirling around in my head that I was very eager to get started. The three biggest aspects of the overall sound design for this level were the weapons, the hoverboard and the crystals. I was the most excited about the crystals because they were what inspired my entire atmosphere for the level and I wanted them to sound just right! Although the weapons and vehicles are obviously the focus of a shooter, I still needed them to fit in with the atmosphere and they needed to sit sonically well with the rest of the design of the level.
Weapon Sound Design
The weapons being the main focus of a shooter game, I wanted to spend a lot of time getting the sounds for them to be just right and to sound pleasant to the ears. No one wants to shoot your guns if they sound terrible! I also wanted the guns to punch through the mix, so they needed to lay in a different frequency from the ambient mix of the level.
The first gun, the link gun, is a very simple gun in design. Being the starter weapon of the game, I didn't want it to sound very powerful and due to the small nature of its projectiles I felt like it indeed wasn't that powerful of a weapon. Despite this though, I wanted it to be fun to shoot. Out of all the weapons in the game, it has the fast firing rate so i really wanted the player to just enjoy blasting away with the gun forever and never be mad when they died and had to start over again with this gun!
The secret of the sound design behind the Link Gun lies in my obsession with Cranberry juice.
The main shot sound of the Link Gun was created solely with a Cranberry juice jug. The logo on the Ocean Spray cranberry juice jugs pop out in a button like shape on the side of the jug. When you press this in, it makes a popping sound. I put three of these in a row and sped them up with TCE Then I processed this new sound through some dynamics, in the end it all morphed into one sound. To give it a quick choppy feel to match up with the green circles of the guns laser animation, I reversed the sound and then I chopped out two sections in the sound to divide it back into three parts which is what gave it the short burst sound that it has. Finally I took an unprocessed version of the logo depression and placed it at the beginning of the sound.
The alternate fire is made up of two layers. The first layer is the opening of the gun to fire the laser beam. This was created with by mainly the cocking a toy rifle I have and the motor sound from inside my printer. The second layer is the beam itself which I made by running a blender through distortion and a phaser.
Link Gun Sound Design from matthew hagberg on Vimeo.
The second gun, the Shock Rifle is made of two main layers as well. The first layer is the sound of the rifle mechanics firing which triggers when the weapon is intially shot. This layer was created with the sliding halt of a ice skater and the whoosh of a heavy object being swung. Both of these sounds were processed and layered to create the fire layer.
Shock Rifle Fire Layer by HagbergSound
The second layer is the beam itself which triggers shortly after the weapon is fired as the beam leaves the gun. This was created by heavily processing an aluminum bat hitting a ball to get the high pitched ring and running a buzz saw through a phaser to add the mid level frequencies to the beam to give it some meat.
Shock Rifle Laser Layer by HagbergSound
When we combine both of these layers together we get the final Shock Rifle main fire sound!
The alternative fire is created using the same fire layer, but the laser layer is different. I wanted the orb that leaves the Shock Rifle to have a bouncy feel to it. I took the twangy sound of a thin metal tray being slammed and processed it through some distortion and a EQ. To give it that "bouncy" feel I ran it through a strong phaser patch. It uses the same baseball ring from the fire laser layer as well.
Shock Rifle Alt Fire Layer by HagbergSound
The final product!
Hoverboard Sound Design
The Hoverboard by far was the hardest sound to create for my project. The idea of a hoverboard is such an abstract concept, there are so many ways that such a thing could sound and its all based on the appearance of the vehicle and any back story on how the creators imagined the board worked mechanically. Due to a lack of developers, I took it upon myself and created my own idea in my head to really help me get started on the hoverboard.
I decided it needed to sound small because the board itself is not very large. The board also doesn't give much for mechanics visually except for a light glow from the bottom, so I decided that it needed to sound very sound and glowing like the colors that come out of the bottom of the board, as if the board was some kind of small nuclear powered device.
It took me several attempts to create the exact sound I wanted for the hoverboard. My first rough attempt using a juice jug full of water ended up sounding more like helicopter.
After a few more creations, my final sound ended up being the mix between a custom patch in Logic's ES2 layered with my crappy, rumbly 1999 Ford Focus underneath. The ES2 achieved the glowing feel that I wanted for the power that lifts the board up, and the tiny size of my cars engine actually ended up working perfectly for the kind of mechanical noise I wanted; something not too powerful and not to big to represent the small vehicles size.
Crystal Sound Design
The sound design of the crystals, although the most important to me, actually ended up being the most simple in design and came together the easiest out of everything. The actual crystal itself is comprised of three layers, two that play simultaneously and a third that is comprised of randomly triggering stingers. The first layer is the hum of the crystal and the second layer is a walla of whispers that emanate lightly from the crystal. The third layer are whisper stingers that are much louder that randomly play from the crystal, calling towards the player.
The hum of the crystal was created by accident when I was in Logic messing around with the pedalboard plugin that I so often use when I get stuck in sound design. I like to experiment with different pedal layers and just use my voice and see how weird or interesting I can get it to sound. In this case I just had a single phaser this time and I took a breathe into the mic and noticed how the oscillation of the phaser caught my breathe in a weird way every time it got louder so I timed my breathe up with the phaser and just breathed with it, creating this warbling hum that faded in and out. The second and third layers are simply the voices of my girlfriend and I trying to sound like evil spirits!
The third and final part of this blog:
Part Three: Implementation!
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