Introduction
In Darktide we wanted all sounds to feel coherent and real, even though the Warhammer 40,000 universe is full of concepts based on fiction. It’s very easy as a sound designer to fall into cliches when making futuristic or fictive designs. You know, a sci-fi gun doesn’t have to go “pew-pew” when you shoot it. Me and the team actively avoided these cliches, because first of all it’s boring, and second of all, the Warhammer 40,000 universe has its own unique sounds.
My name is Johan W., one of the sound designers here at Fatshark. And in this dev blog I’m gonna go into some details in the process of creating the sound direction for Darktide.
How It Started
A good place to start is to bring up Anders D. G., our Game Director. He was the one sitting on the vision for Darktide. We had a lot of chats about sound and music in general and shared references about how the world of Darktide should feel.
To me personally though, everything kind of started with a very particular sound. It’s a synth preset I did. I named it the Darktide Distortion Bend. There was nothing special about it really, but each time I played it, I got into a headspace I liked. It sounded dark and gritty, it had an analogue synth feel and it felt powerful and dangerous. This is a bit fuzzy I know, but I thought that described my idea of Darktide pretty well. From there, I started comparing everything I did to see if they’d fit together.
You can actually hear it in the very first teaser trailer we did (that wobbly distorted revving sound around 01:05 in the video).
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide - Official Teaser Trailer
And in the second trailer…
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide - Official Gameplay Trailer
And in the sound of you dying…
player_state_death_01.wav
The distortion bend-sound was actually my starting point even for the Lasgun, which we knew was gonna be one of the most important weapons to get right from the start. And we knew for certain that it wasn’t gonna sound like a generic sci-fi laser weapon. For that reason it went through tons of iterations just to find the balance between grittiness, punchiness and finding out what the “las”-part of the weapon was gonna sound like for Darktide. We wanted to create a lasgun sound that remained faithful to the source material. It also had to be at least somewhat satisfying to use, if anyone was gonna use it. I ended up working with mostly analog noises from electrical gear, some frying pan noises and some real gun sounds as well, just to up the realism. I decided to focus on the heat from the photons, instead of the “crack” that has sometimes been described (although there are a lot of cracking sounds when you’re running out of ammo instead). (Shoutout to my previous lead/boss Danijel Djuric who did the first prototypes for the Lasgun. I continued everything where he left it when he left the company.)
When I say analog noises, I mostly talk about this set of module synths that served me very well for Darktide. Not just for Lasguns but almost every psyker sound has something to do with this one.
Once a few more areas of the game started to shape up. We started to more accurately grasp what the sound of Darktide should be about. Eventually I tried putting it into words. The idea was that every sound we put in the game should follow this set of guidelines.
I’m just gonna copy paste what was written. It was only meant internally for the sound team. It’s very technical and perhaps super boring to most of you. But I feel like some of you might find it interesting. So here we go!
The Sound Direction of Darktide
The soundscape of Darktide is made out of metal, dirt, analogue gear, broken electronics, old huge machines. Nothing is well oiled, so heavy squeak, creek, stress and spark sounds are a big part of the soundscape. “High-tech” doesn’t belong in this world. If something is digital it should feel like an old computer with broken harddrives and clunky buttons. It’s much closer to cyberpunk than sci-fi in that sense. High-pitched beeps and classic laser type of sounds are strictly forbidden, pure heresy. With Darktide we are not just creating a game-play experience, we are bringing a universe to life. That mindset should be reflected in how we design this game. It should feel like we are in a place too large to grasp, and the player is just a tiny piece in a large story taking place. We do this by emphasizing the scale of things.
Oversized Realism
Every single worldized audio source in Darktide should sound real, even though we are making a surreal game. We also want most things in Darktide to sound huge, larger than most items that exist in real life. This is a challenge, because it sounds contradictory. How do we create realism if there’s no real-life reference to compare it to? Here’s the answer… If a sound has a natural frequency balance, dynamic range and width that corresponds to the distance it’s being heard from, it’s going to sound realistic. So if we are designing, say, a pistol sound, we should first imagine it being at least twice the size of a real-life pistol and then reflect on how that would sound if it was real. If we are able to create a huge pistol sound, but also stay within a realistic frequency balance, dynamics and width, it’s going to fit into the Darktide universe.
Even Magical Sounds Should Be Organic
Every concept that involves unrealistic materials or sources of power should still be based on something organic. For example Las-weapons are based on electric sounds and old electronic gear. That way we can make it sound organic because there are a lot of real life recordings to use and get inspiration from. Plasma-weapons are based on water and some analogue synthesis. The warp mainly consists of pulsating analog circuits and glitches. This way we can maintain the feeling of realism even with the most unrealistic concepts. You will also much easier get high quality textures in the sounds when using real recordings as assets.
Dark and Gritty (But Not Harsh to Listen to)
Darktide should sonic-ally be pleasant on the ears, but nothing in this universe should feel pleasant. A successful example of this is when a sound feels gritty but not harsh on the ears. It’s very important to separate the sound design from the mix-quality of the sound. Both aspects need to be fulfilled in order to fit in the game. Always reflect before committing on a design choice, “Could I make this sound feel even darker?” Usually the darker the better. If a sound feels cute, happy, funny it doesn’t belong in this world. The only occasion we can allow ourselves to be comical is a dark sense of humor. In Darktide you can never go too horrifying or brutal.
Spatial Audio
The whole soundscape of Darktide is based on the principle that everything that can be spatialized, should be spatialized. Always 3D over 2D as long as it makes sense. Even stingers should strive towards always being 3D because we want to present it as an in-world sound. We wanna avoid non-diegetic sounds, even if that is the more traditional way of doing it. The only exception should be UI and player experience sounds.
Prioritize Game-Play in the Mix
Even if the design goal for Darktide is immersion and realism, game-play needs to be the priority when necessary. The human perception is limited and can’t hear everything at all times, especially from just a pair of speakers. So priorities need to be made in order to keep the mix readable. We should always strive for danger sounds (things that can hurt the player) and game-play informative sounds (e.g. hits, abilities, stingers, to be prioritized. It’s incredibly complex and we don’t always get it right, but we try our best.
The Combat
Okay, so combat… The direction for the combat sounds went through some turns during production. We started off with the goal of making it feel as real as possible. Battlefield was a reference in several discussions about how the guns should feel (not sound). We thought that pure realism would fit the game direction perfectly, painting the perspective of the regular people, etc. If you’re just a disposable soldier, the gameplay should probably feel like a battlefield was our thinking. And the enemies should be loud and powerful to convey your insignificance even more. This was a total 180 turn from the Vermintide sound design, where you are this cinematic hero where your actions are loud, fun and powerful. I remember this shift in design approach when I first got my hands on the thunder hammer. I got the brief from Mats (combat designer) that it should sound like a lightning strike right in front of you and it should feel like you’re just melting everything. I knew I couldn’t do it realistically, it had to be cinematic and fat as hell. By that time, we had started to work with some “kill confirm” sounds. I wanted to make them big and satisfying too in a way that could work alongside big thunder hammer sounds. All of a sudden we started to enter a territory that was closer to Vermintide where we had big and punchy sounds during combat, and I think everyone agreed that this was just so much more fun to play with. I still wanted to restrain us and not just drop the realism part. I still believed it was possible to do both. Here’s where the “oversized realism” direction I talked about earlier started.
I’m glad we ended up putting in so much effort in making the combat feel fun and rewarding, shout out to Sebastian G. who helped out so much on the gameplay code side. He was the one enabling me to add different hit sounds based on where you hit, how hard you hit, with what you hit and what you hit it with, if the enemy died from the hit and so on. It really helped us make the combat more immersive and satisfying. I really enjoyed the detail that you get different kill confirm sounds based on what enemy type you killed. All these small parts came together pretty good, it just makes you wanna smash things, am I right?
The Enemies
There is a lot to talk about the enemies. I won’t go into detail on how they were designed. That’s something we can talk about in another dev blog as it wasn’t me who did most of them. Anders N. did most of the work here, and of course our great VO designers David W., Ola and David F… My main focus was to make them work in the mix, and make sure the sounds fit the gameplay loop. This might have been the most challenging part of the whole sound mix actually.
If you miss a sound cue during a mission you might die, but if the game is just full of sound cues all the time, they’d stop being cues and just turn into noise. You’d also lose most of the immersion if we went full-on arcade with stingers all over the place. We had to be very selective of what to present to the players, but never select the wrong things.
Anyway, instead of putting the main focus on making the most sophisticated hierarchical mixing system, I wanted the main problem solving to take place in the actual sound design. For example, instead of making a trapper three times as loud as a mauler in order to hear, we wanted to make sure they didn’t even compete in the mix. Because sometimes you’d even wanna hear the mauler over the trapper. Basically the goal was that multiple enemy sound cues could play simultaneously and still be readable. To try and achieve this we had to make sure each enemy not only had unique sounds, they also had to be differentiated in terms of timbre, pitch, duration, loudness, etc. as much as possible. We had to use all kinds of mixing and psychoacoustics tricks to make them stand out from each other as much as possible. To fully understand why and how this works you need some basic understanding of sound theory and acoustics. This took us a long way, but more was needed to be done in a chaotic game such as Darktide.
Another way we worked to make the special enemies stand out in the mix was to just have them behave differently game-play wise. Poxbursters are designed to be heard from a distance so you have time to shoot it. Trappers are supposed to be sneaky so they are heard mostly when they are close by. Mutant chargers are meant to be heard over time with more low frequency content. Snipers with a very specific “dodge or die” sound that only happens once. Chaos hounds have a distinct spawning sound, which is supposed to make you aware that dogs are coming, then you have to wait and see where they show up. Other enemies like the flamer are purposefully more reliant on the visuals to not bloat the mix too much. Same goes for bosses, you don’t really need super clear sound cues for them, because you can’t miss them.
All these small parts, a lot of mixing, (which I won’t go into here), makes the enemies audible even in the most chaotic moments. That was our goal at least.
The Levels
The ambience of Darktide had a pretty clear direction from the beginning. It was also one of those things we could start to work on before a lot of the game mechanics were fully in place. We knew that it had to feel huge, industrial and obviously grimdark. But we wanted to do it realistically. Usually when creating big environments you try to utilize nature and animals to make the space feel alive. That wasn’t really possible in Darktide. You are almost never outdoors, everything is made out of metal and seemingly no wild life. To make the environments feel alive we had to use other tools. As I described earlier we wanted the players to feel small and vulnerable in this world. To further convey this we focused on adding sounds that felt huge and distant. Big metal stress sounds, huge fans and machinery going off in the distance. In some areas there is warfare going on, or speakers playing propaganda, but it’s all fairly distant sounding. I think that just adds to this feeling of size to the place. And also your insignificance as a player, the world is simply too big to care for you. Maybe my colleague Jonas Hellberg can tell you more about the level events and how he makes huge world sounds in another dev blog.
The propaganda played out in the levels is actually a quite fun medium that we’ve used a lot to further tell a story about the different areas of Atoma. What’s being said from them is based on missions and if the Imperial cultists are occupying that area. On some missions it is cultists that play their own propaganda through the PA-systems.
Another important aspect of the level sound design is that we kept a very high quality of the reverbs, which are all impulse responses of real spaces. Every ambience loop is in surround formats and we use sound portals to properly propagate the sounds through corridors, open doors, windows etc instead of them traveling directly through the walls. That is a big upgrade from the Vermintide games that I think made a huge difference in the end.
The Music
The music of Darktide is today a huge part, some say the biggest part of Darktide’s sound. And it’s all thanks to our composer Jesper Kyd, who exceeded our expectations to say the least. But this wasn’t the case throughout the whole production. Jesper came in fairly late in the production process. We released our first three trailers without a composer just because we hadn’t found the right one yet. Who the hell did the music for the first three then you might ask? Well that’s not important. Let’s just agree that it got so much better when we finally decided to ask Jesper. Anders De Geer presented our vision, we gave him some more sound mix pointers, and he was able to translate it into music so well. We wanted gritty organic analog sounds, and he had a bunch of old analog synths that he was itching to use. A match made in heaven? He got a lot of creative freedom, since we kind of had a very similar vision of the game we never really had to direct him much at all. His work kind of just molt together with our sound design, and there we had the sound of Darktide presented to us for the first time.
Alright, well, that’s it for now! I hope you found this somewhat interesting, and hopefully It revealed some more insight into how I (along with the rest of the team) shaped the sound for Darktide that we all know and (hopefully) love. It took a lot of effort to ship this game, from a lot of talented people. I’m so proud of what we’ve done thus far. And a lot more is to come!
If you have any questions about some of our design decisions, or any of the more tech-specific words I used, or if there is more you want to know on the topic, please comment below! Me or someone else in the team would happily talk more on any topic, preferably sound related. I’m sure StrawHat will pass them along to me and I’ll do my best to respond.
Ok thanks bye!
– Johan