Creative Destruction
Overview
Please wear a headphone and watch the video, Auro 3D is used for precisely locating the footsteps and weapon sound with binaural technic:
Project Snapshot
BuildTopia is a Real-time Creative Shoot Game. Besides the fight, the player can collect construction material to build defenses and traps. Auro3D is used to enhance the gameplay immersion with the precise spatial sound location.
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Tools: Reaper, Wwise
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Engine: NeoX
Sound Design Overview
As a battle royal game with the cartoon style, The weapon sound design should not only rely on the realistic recording samples but should also add sweeteners to make them fit the cartoon art. My design goal is to highlight the character of each weapon with a sound "signature". For example, the sniper gun has a low rate of fire, to enhance the power of every shot, I added a metal hitting layer to exaggerate the firing process, this small sweetener completely changes the feedback of this rifle. Some YouTubers are impressed by this sound and they are eager to get the gun even with a high risk. This is a successful case that sound design can have a big impact on the gameplay and immersion.
Another highlight of this project is the precise sound location. It's a very important information source for the player to use sound to detect and locate where the enemy is in a battle royal game. Normal stereo sound spacial location is not accurate to support a quick reaction gameplay. To solve this problem, the Auro3D plugin is introduced into Wwise. It utilizes HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) to process sound signals, and imitates the human hearing process with double ears. With a normal earphone, the player will notice the weapon sounds are vivid and precise as if he is on the battle field.
Auro 3D plugin is used to make the enemies' location more precise
To ensure memory-saving, all weapon sound effects include first-person-view and third-person-view, using dry fire sound with tails to satisfy different landscapes. The following video uses the sniper as an example to show the structure:
What I learned in this project
This project was assigned to me at the half part of the development. I had to get familiar with all the assets, quickly cut into production, and solve problems. After I had taken over the project for nearly two weeks, I found some previous soundbanks were not correctly compressed and occupied much storage. We can not update all these packages directly because it refers to significant data changes and is limited by App Store. To solve this problem, I talked with programmers and figured out a method: Transfer the whole project to a new one, delete redundancy and correct appropriate compression settings before the next big version update: Because the big version update force all players to re-download the whole game, which is the best chance to upload these changes. Although I had to crunch to solve this problem and other similar ones at the start, the final result was good: Some Youtubers spoke highly of the weapons’ sound spontaneously during the live show. This project provided me with valuable experience intervening in a new developing project and solving problems in a short time range.
