Hello and welcome to our fourth devlog!
I'm Torbjørn and in this devlog I’ll dive into the sound of PVKK. I will talk a bit about the general philosophy of the audio design, some systems and some insight into how some of the sounds were made :)
You can read all the details below, but I thought that obviously a devlog on sound design should feature something you can hear. For this, I made a video for you, showcasing some sounds in the game but also how I created them.
Interactions: Game feel and fun
We have the mindset that if there is something in the bunker that looks like you can interact with it, you can. A big part of this is of course the audio. By using audio you can tell if the switch you just flicked did nothing, turned on a light or overloaded the whole air vent system causing a leak.
The audio is used to both compliment an interaction and in some cases be the feature of the interaction itself.
Realism vs Believability
If a sound should be as realistic as possible or pass as believable is something that's put a lot of thought into. Our goal for the audio is to make it feel as cool and satisfying as possible. You are going to be pressing a lot of buttons and flicking a bunch of switches so it has to feel good for a long time!
This is why in most cases the sounds have been designed to be believable rather than super realistic. Some examples of this are the cannon fire and the ships exploding outside. The sound of the cannon firing contains layers of cannon fire, explosions, a volcano erupting and various synth sounds. All of these layers serve as building blocks to make the cannon sound as big and powerful as possible. It's not realistic, but I think it's believable!
Little insight in how I layer sounds, not playing every layer at the same time gives the sound more dynamics and movement
As we know sounds travel at around 340m per second, so when we see an explosion 3km away it would take around 9 seconds before we hear the sound. In PVKK we fire at ships that are so far away that if you don't know about this or don't pay attention you could miss it, think it feels weird or think that it's a bug. Even though it's realistic and cool we chose to make the delay much shorter to get a faster response. We think this still makes the effect feel believable, but avoid the risk of people missing the effect or thinking something is broken.
Ambience: The machine lives!
We want the bunker to feel like there is a lot going on under the hood. Things are not only happening inside your room, you are part of a larger facility.
You are going to hear machines working, running pipes, creaks and various sounds coming from all around you in addition to the weather outside the bunker.
Ideally you should be able to stop at any point anywhere in the bunker and just listen for a bit and you will hear something interesting or feel like you really are a part of a big living machinery.
Audio systems: Gameplay driving audio
As mentioned earlier we focus a lot on making the interactions feel good, and that is why we have made some custom audio solutions to trigger audio based on how you interact with things. All levers and wheels are checking both the velocity and how far they have moved to trigger sound that makes sense. If you pull a lever slowly you can hear it subtly tick and creak or if you send the wheel spinning you hear rapid gear crunching.
When you sit down and zoom into the console we move the player a bit forward and closer to the sound source. This makes it easier to focus on what you are doing and filter out your surroundings a bit.
Systems like these combined help make all you do feel more real and helps with focus and immersion.
How it's made: Recording is fun!
As many sounds as possible are made from my own recordings, be it whatever sounds cool in my apartment, synths or random things I stumble upon when walking outside.
The recordings are then tuned, tweaked and often run though some effects so they work and sound like they fit in the game.
The sounds of the teleradio is a good example of this. The source for the button press sounds are recordings I took of my friend's old radio!
Writing this made me realise I never turned it on, I should go do that
This old tape recorder is also a source for various different sound for multiple devices in the bunker, the teleradio and some upcoming ones! Turning, tweaking, pressing and generally playing with things like this in ways it was not intended can result in some really interesting sounds that can be really unique :)
Doesn't really matter what's on the tape (as long as it's not copyrighted ofc), you can usually always get some cool results by messing with the speed and playback controls
And that's it
To summarise, there is going to be a bunch of small intricate sounds to listen out for and some big ones that will hopefully make you go “oh yeah”!
The audio work is far from over and most of it is still subject to change as we keep exploring and developing the game further :)
Think that's enough rambling for today, but if you want to know more or ask some questions or come with ideas and inspiration, head over to our Discord, we are all active there!
Thanks for reading all this, hope you got something out of it :D
-Torbjørn