Green Glass
（青璃）
Overview
Please wear a headphone or open the speaker to watch this video. It is the first boss fight.
The first boss fight
Project Snapshot
Green Glass is a free, indie mobile RPG, it's an experiment to test new graphic technology and aesthetic ideas, especially for music and sound effects. The game won The Best Sound Design Award of the 4th IMGA China.
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Tools: Reaper, Wwise
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Engine: NeoX
Sound Design Overview
This game is unique in its art design. It is a mixture of Chinese and Japanese animation art concepts, the story happened in a fictitious ancient period, but it brings a modern feeling to the player: not only the characters' outlook but also the Japanese jazz hip-hop music pieces. To handle this particular project, I talked a lot with the game designer and watched reference animations like Samurai Champloo. After several sound effects samples production, the direction of sound design for the characters' weapons is based on cold weapons with the Japanese animated style.
To highlight the main character and bosses are masters of swordsmanship, all of their attacking skills have a quick frequency, and some attacks are divided into several small pieces, which can be interrupted. This means all the weapons' sound effects should be separated as small independent units and successive as a whole ensemble. This is a big challenge for me.
Overview of Reaper project
To settle down the sound style and clarify what the game designer wanted, I started making only one attack sound effect for the main character and communicated with the game designer to get feedback. After nine versions of iterations, the game designer confirmed that mid-heavy-whoosh combined with Japanese katana-style high-frequency blade sounds to construct all characters' attack and skill sound effects. The following videos demonstrate the boss skills (Weapon-only). Please unmute the sound at the bottom right of the video:
Boss skill 1
Boss skill 2
Mixing
Mixing is focused on normal gangs and boss fights. Dynamic side-chain can highlight important sound effects at different battle stages. The image below shows the important hierarchy of the sound from high to low during the fight and the ducking relationship with each other.
Brief Side-Chain Routing for battle
One of side-chain parameters
Postmortem
I want to discuss the different understandings of the sword sound effects style from western and eastern views—this topic derived from my working experience in this project.
At nearly the end of the project, I handed over the project to our foreign sound experts team to make the final adjustments. After they gave back the project, I found all the sword sound effects had been replaced with some realistic metal hit sounds. My first impression is that the attack became very simple and lost speed feeling. When the game designer listened to the new sound effects, he immediately told me to revise to the original version. I invited experts and the game designer to sit down and communicate to solve the divergence. The game designer expressed the same feeling that was similar to mine: Exaggerated sword scraped sound is the key element to support the whole game style, which is unrealistic. The experts thought the original sound assets were full of high frequency and not clean. If I were the third party, I should admit that it was a different view of the same sword, and it was hard to say which one was right. But this was an independent game, and it was full of the game designer's will. The final result was obvious: there was no negotiation on the game style, and the new sound effects were unfit.
This event brings me a new thought: All game assets should be maintained and kept in the same direction. There is no right or wrong but fit or not. Sometimes the sound designer's aesthetic appreciation of sound may not be the same as the game designer's; communication is the best way to solve the problem. In some special projects, the sound designer should figure out and provide what the game designer wants, not what the sound designer himself wants.