Save & Sound has arrived! For those who’ve never heard of it, this is a fabulous online event that celebrates audio in video-games and showcases some incredible talent across a truck load of awesome new games.
During the previous event Randall Breneman made us this fantastic video about the tracks he wrote for Star Trucker.
This year we have an audio deep dive from super talented Ross Stack. It ended up a bit chunky so we’re splitting it into two parts to be posted across the first two days of the event.
- Part 1 - Finding the Sound & Implementation
- Part 2 - The Mix & Non-Diegetic Music
We hope you enjoy this little dip into Star Trucker’s audio production and the secrets of our sounds!
- Monster Dave
Intro
Hi. I’m Ross, lead audio designer at Laced Audio and the person responsible for the sounds you hear in Star Trucker. That includes everything from all the little beeps and warnings in your truck, to environmental space anomalies, and most importantly, the sounds of your truck engines.
But before I delve too deep into the details, let’s go back and talk about my first steps as a sound designer on Star Trucker.
Finding the Sound
When I first heard the elevator pitch for Star Trucker I was immediately sold on the vision for the project. A space trucking sim with a killer rock and country soundtrack with a cast of memorable characters to encounter along the way! Star Trucker was one of those rare projects that so perfectly aligned with my own creative interests, it was impossible for me not to get immensely excited to work on it.
My first experience of the game was seeing early captures of the truck driving gameplay. At this stage, the layout of the truck and core functionality was mostly the same as it is in the final release, save for some cosmetic details and extra modules. It was immediately clear, even from these early gameplay captures, that the truck was essentially going to be the lead character of the game. As such, it was the first thing I focused on as a sound designer.
After a few brainstorming sessions with Dave and Dan, we had outlined a rough idea of how we wanted the truck to sound. Early on, we spent a lot of time discussing the balance of sci-fi, versus more realistic, familiar sounds, and where on this scale the star truck would fit. We established that we wanted to lean into a more realistic approach. We wanted your star truck to feel like a tangible, living, breathing machine held together with nuts and bolts. Personally, I liked the idea of trying to convey a certain fragility in the truck, constantly reminding the player that this thin metal shell is the only thing separating them from the void, so they better take care of it!
^ Audio pre-vis supplied to Monster and Monster for sign-off of on audio concept
I started by mocking up sounds to the gameplay captures as if I were tracklaying sounds for linear media like TV or film. This approach is always quite freeing and allows you to establish a creative direction early in a project that can serve as an anchor point as you progress.
That said, throughout this process I’m always thinking about how these sounds are going to be implemented in a technical sense. Full disclosure here, I spent four years working as a sound designer on Elite: Dangerous, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t let some of that experience inform my approach to Star Trucker.
To keep the sounds of the truck grounded and realistic sounding, most of the characterful source sounds for the truck engines actually come from a variety of vintage trucks such as a 1979 Mack Semi.
Using these realistic source sounds is really useful for adding an authentic flavour to the star truck, but one of the problems that you run into is that when you start modifying the pitch of these assets too much during gameplay, the illusion can be broken, and they actually start to sound unrealistic.
We’re so accustomed to hearing the sounds of combustion engines, that when we’re presented with a facsimile of this, we can easily tell it’s a fake. To combat this, I added some subtle synth and turbine layers to the sounds of the star truck to gently pull it away from sounding overtly truck-like. These new layers responded much better to being pitched up and down at runtime because they didn’t have so much complex frequency content, allowing them to serve the function of conveying speed, whereas all of the real world source sounds give the star truck the sense of character.
Implementation
Once the Monsters were happy with the previs, I started breaking the truck sounds down into separate looped layers, each describing individual elements of the inner workings of the truck such as thruster loops for pitch, yaw, roll, engine idling layers, engine acceleration layers etc.
One of the things I needed to consider was how the truck would sound based on whether you were in first person or external view. This resulted in having to design separate sets of sounds for both perspectives. All in all, I ended up with about 17-20 SFX layers for just the truck movement alone. This might seem like a lot, but during gameplay generally only hearing 6-8 of these layers at any one time.
Let’s talk about how these sounds are implemented. For the Star Trucker project we chose to implement the audio using a relatively new middleware solution called Sonity. It ended up being a cost effective solution which enabled us to quickly get up and running with some relatively complex audio implementation.
Above you can see how Sonity allows us to group multiple sounds together, each with their own parameterisation for pitch and volume based on real time data from the truck, and then essentially trigger all of these sounds as one event.
The key to imbuing the truck with a sense of realism was in fine tuning these pitch and volume curves along with the relative balance of all layers so that they feel responsive to player input but also provide useful feedback as they drive. For instance, as you accelerate from stationary, there is more emphasis on bassier truck layers, rumbles and shudders so that you feel the weight of the star truck as you slowly gain speed. These layers then fade out over time making way for mid-centred engine sounds that convey a truck at cruising speeds.
Check back tomorrow to learn about the mix & non-diegetic music!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380050