Hi, and welcome back to the DevBlog! This month’s post is a bit of an indulgence for me as I get to talk about the sound design in TFC! When I first joined the project way back in the day, it was mainly to help with sound and music, which has been a lot of fun!
I could probably talk about sound design in TFC until the cows come home, so I’ll try to limit it a bit in this post and stick to giving a sense of what tools I have used and what we’re going for aesthetically. Also, there will be a fair bit of jargon in this blog post, but I’ll try to explain as we go along!
The Idea
When we started, TFC was a very different looking game. It had a fairly lo-fi visual aesthetic and looked a lot less intricate than what it does now. Since then, we’ve obviously seen big improvements to both UI and art. (With further updates to the UI right around the corner!) But this was the version of TFC I started to put sounds to, and it informed some design choices early on that worked well as a starting point for the rest of the sound design.
With its lo-fi aesthetic, it was very easy to start thinking about using 8-bit style sound design, reminiscent of the old NES games, in TFC. However, we were aiming for a fairly smooth soundscape as we wanted to make a game that people could play for long periods of time without getting annoyed or tired of the sound design. So, this was consideration number one for us, and you’ll see this reflected in the music as well! I’ll do a post about that too, one day:)
I also wanted to impose a sort of creative limitation on myself, sort of a challenge, and that was to create all the sounds in the game using one specific synthesiser. For those who aren’t big music nerds; a synthesiser is a tool often used in music and sound production that creates (or synthesises) sounds either digitally or electronically, as opposed to relying on recordings of audio. My thinking was that this would be a fun way to learn more about the synth, push the envelope a bit for what the synth can do, and would also likely make the sound design a bit more coherent.
The Nitty Gritty
So, what is this synthesiser that was supposed to generate all the sounds in the game, and what sounds did end up being responsible for?
Well, it is the Elektron Monomachine SFX-60+ MkII, and it is worthy of a few blog posts just by itself, though I’ll limit it to a short introduction here: It is a very digital sounding synth that can either operate as six independent monophonic synths or as one six voice synth. It also has an amazing sequencer per synth, which makes it great to create songs or loops on.
So, in TFC, the Monomachine is responsible for all the in-world sounds that aren’t ambience sounds or voices (although it can do voice synthesis, too!). That means, every time a tree is being chopped, a sword is being swung and so on, you’re hearing the Monomachine. While I was saying before that I wanted to steer away from 8 bit samples in the game, the Monomachine has some great 12 bit drum samples, which form the basis of most of the in-world sounds. It also can make small changes to the sound every time you play it! So all of the sounds made with the Monomachine have up to 12 variations, where they have a slightly different pitch or a sound slightly different in some other way. This means that when you sit and listen to someone chopping wood, it doesn’t repeat the exact same sound over and over again, as that would get annoying very quickly.
This is achieved by modulating the different parameters of the synth, meaning we change the value of the pitch, for example. We can do this manually, or we can do this with a modulator. Almost all synths have modulators of some sort, and often you can assign them to any parameter you want, and they will wiggle that parameter for you.
Another key part of our audio workflow is FMOD. FMOD is an audio implementation middleware that sits between Unity, which is our game engine, and myself. Chances are you’ve seen the logo during the splash screen of other games, and even if you haven’t, it is very likely that you have played a game that is using FMOD.
By using FMOD, I get to have much greater control of how audio is played in the game itself. This means that I can experiment and explore different ideas much faster and without having to ask too much of the programmer! One thing FMOD does well is to make it easy to add variation to a sound, to modulate it. So, in the same way that we have used slight variations in the sound to create 12 different sounding versions of the same sound, FMOD now makes it easy to add even more variation to those 12 sounds.
FMOD is also responsible for the spatialisation of the sounds. That means that when you move the camera across the screen, the sound of someone chopping wood will pan around and feel like it is somewhat tied to the location where the woodchopping is happening. We haven’t tried to go for pinpoint accuracy here, but it is very useful as there are a lot of people chopping wood at any one time in the game, and if you had to listen to all of them at once, that would be annoying, too! So we have tried to make it so that the ones that matter to you in the moment, the ones you can see, make sounds and the rest are quiet.
Now that we have gotten further in the development, and the game has gotten more intricate both visually and gameplay wise, I have ended up abandoning the “one synth approach” and instead branching out to other synths capable of producing different sounds, as well as having a larger focus on recordings. Currently, I am in the process of creating wind sounds, for example, and I have been using Unfiltered Audio’s Lion, which I’ll take a moment here to shout out. It has all the modulation you could ever need and then some! And some interesting noise oscillators to boot! In the context of synthesisers, modulation is the ability to move different parameters of the synth automatically.
The recorded sounds
In addition to synthesised sounds, you might have also heard a fair few drums and flutes in the game! You will find those most in the user interface sounds, so clicking buttons in the menus, placing buildings and even game over sounds and so on.
Some of the heavier drum sounds are from a taiko drumming class I took many years ago. Taiko drums are Japanese drums that sound awesome, and they have a very specific playing style and are often played in large ensembles. When I was lucky enough to take that class all those years ago, I brought with me a handheld recorder and went around after the class, recording as many drums as I could. An interesting take away from that session was that the best sounding drum was actually one that was broken, where the drum skin was flapping around a bit. You can hear it when selecting buildings, for example, the Palace. There are also a fair few taiko drums in the multiplayer lobby sounds!
Also in the multiplayer lobbies, you can hear a flute when you unready. This is a very cheap flute that is sold as a souvenir at The Big Banana, which is a tourist attraction in New South Wales in Australia. It is a faux bamboo flute where they have marked it to look like a bamboo flute, it is not in key and doesn’t sound very good, but for some reason, it is great for flute sound effects! So, whenever you hear any flute sounds in the menus, this is what you’re hearing.
There are also some wood elements in the user interface sounds, and in a very similar fashion to the flute, this is a very cheap coconut kalimba that I found at an antique shop in my neighbourhood. It, too, is out of tune, doesn’t play right, but makes a lot of great sounds that are useful for sound design. The tines, the little rods you play to make sound are all over the place regarding pitch, and while I’ve tried to tune it, it doesn’t seem interested in maintaining a pitch! But, by whacking it, playing it with chopsticks and interacting with all the ways you can think of, it can make some pretty cool sounds!
Some musings about sound design and the road forward
To my mind, sound has the ability to expand the world of the game outside of what is shown on screen, and this can happen across a few different dimensions. One of these dimensions are the abstract vs the concrete, or the stylised vs the naturalistic. I don’t always feel like it is necessary to couple lo-fi or stylised visual aesthetics with lo-fi or stylised audio aesthetics. Combining a more naturalistic sound design with visuals that are fairly abstract can in certain scenarios make the world feel more real.
I’m throwing in a lot of “sometimes” and “certain”’ here, as there are no actual rules for this, but for TFC, I am in the process of realizing that it could work well with a more naturalistic sound design for parts of the soundscape. I started experimenting with this idea when I implemented recordings of birds to try to make the world feel more comfortable and real. It would’ve been a great exercise to create bird sounds with synths, but I felt like it would be interesting to see how recordings would fit in the world. It definitely made it feel more comfortable, a world you’d like to spend some time in.
Once the bird sounds were in, it became clear how awkward the silence in the game could be at times. I had always wanted to have some sort of ambience sound in the game, but it became clear how necessary it was after the birds were implemented. This led to me starting the process of adding wind sounds, which we hope will change as you pan across deserts onto forested areas, representing what you’re looking at, at any given time. While this is a synthesised sound, I am aiming for something that will sound more naturalistic, and it has been a great learning experience to see just how close we can get to something natural sounding with just software!
Another recent experiment we have undertaken sound wise is the implementation of a reverb. This means that there is some sense of the sounds bouncing around in the environment. There are interesting things we could do here too, like changing the reverb to reflect perhaps how many trees are surrounding the sound generating object, or even buildings, but for now we are starting with trying to find a general ambience that works well and is subtle enough so that it doesn’t take too much of people’s attention! The goal is really for people not to notice it unless we remove it.
The Outro
All this to say that I’m very much still experimenting with the sound design in TFC. So far I think there are some cool sounds in there, and I’m very happy we’ll get to spend some time implementing new sounds and come up with new ideas for implementation of sounds in the game going forward. The Early Access release will let us gather a fair bit of feedback which is very helpful in marrying what I think is a cool idea for sound design with what the players actually want. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Stay tuned for further updates on this! There will likely be more sound and music specific blog posts in the future, and we’ll be trying to stick to monthly DevBlogs, though things are heating up a bit here development-wise as we get closer to release!
For any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me on the Discord at bit.ly/TFC_Discord or via email at [email protected].
Thanks for reading!
-Anders