Hello Riftbreakers!
When discussing game development, people often gloss over the audio side a little bit. It is quite natural, to be completely honest. New graphical developments are immediately noticeable. Beautiful shadows, reflections, and other effects make modern games a visual feast. At the same time, revolutionary gameplay mechanics and rich storylines ensure that we remember what we played for years. The sound is an outlier here. Since we can replicate and create almost any sound on most audio devices, we got used to its high quality and tend not to notice it most of the time. Still, it is a big part of a game’s presentation layer, and we want to tell you a little bit about it today.
Most of the media in this article are videos, which you should watch with sound on.
Whenever we add something to The Riftbreaker, be it a new weapon, building, or creature, we need to think about the sounds it is going to make. Over the course of our lifetime, our brains develop a subconscious expectation of what kind of sounds we can expect from any given object or phenomenon. Small creatures make squeaky, high-pitched sounds, hiss and snarl. Large monsters with gaping maws make your insides tremble with their mighty roar and shake their surroundings with their footsteps. You can always hear clanging and rumbling from inside a factory… The list goes on and on.
Even though most of the things we design sounds for in the Riftbreaker do not exist in the real world, the game's visual aspect is often quite enough for us to know what kind of sounds we are looking for. We briefly describe our ‘expectations’ for our sound designer. Then, he scours thousands of sound samples from various libraries in search of the perfect one for the occasion. More often than not, the perfect sound does not exist - finding a perfect sample for the effect you want to achieve is hard. Then, the sound designer has to get creative and mix a couple of samples to get the effect he wants.
We’re going to use a simple example here. When we were looking for a good sound for our rocket launchers, we wanted the sound they make to be both punchy and booming with bass. We found a sample that cut through the chaos of battle pretty okay but was lacking in the low end of the sound spectrum. Luckily, there is an entire “genre” of sound samples called textures. They are not meant to be used on their own. Instead, you can use them to beef up other samples. We found a couple that worked well but couldn’t decide on just one… So we used all of them instead! The result is what you know as the rocket launcher shot sound in the game today.
Other times, creating a sound effect is not that easy. One of the most complex sounds in the game is the one tied to Mr. Riggs’ movement. It has a lot of layers - the servomotors moving the mech’s body parts, the clanging metal from all the parts of armor, and the footsteps themselves. We wanted to cover all the bases with just one sample at first. You can hear our early attempts in the video below. Safe to say, we were not happy with the results for two reasons. First of all - it didn’t sound good enough. That could be fixed with a bit more work. However, the second problem lay a lot deeper. Due to the free movement of the mech in the game, the sample often got cut in the middle of playback. That had to be solved with the help of programmers.
We decided that combining the samples of the mech's entire ‘walk’ cycle into one sound was not the way to go. Instead, we separated all the portions of the sound we told you about earlier. Then, we attached all those individual sounds to various moments in the ‘running’ animation. Once the game detects that the mech is moving, it plays a short loop of servomotor sounds that sound good, even if stopped abruptly. Footsteps are played back only when the mech’s foot touches the ground. This also allows us to detect what kind of a surface you’re walking on and play a sample prepared for that type of terrain. That allowed us to finally solve all the problems. And that was just the walking sound!
At some point, we realized that the scope of The Riftbreaker was so large that we wouldn’t have the time to do all of the sound effects justice. We decided to give the job to Marcin Pukaluk, our music composer. As a professional musician, he has the necessary experience, skills, and tools that are needed to pull this kind of job off. He is the author of the vast majority of The Riftbreaker’s soundscape. The next time you don’t notice a sound because it blends with the environment well, you know who to thank for that!
Speaking of Marcin, he was also responsible for The Riftbreaker’s entire soundtrack. When we started our collaboration, we told him that we wanted the game’s soundtrack to feature a recurring theme that could ‘come back’ in various songs featured in the game. When you think of it, many popular pieces of media have a music theme. We decided to learn from the best: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Uncharted, and even Doom. Other than that, Marcin had complete creative freedom when it came to the composition of the tracks. We are really pleased with how it turned out. If you haven’t done it yet, give the soundtrack a listen. We put it up on YouTube. You can find it right here:
The portion of the audio that was left for us to prepare on our own was the dialogues. We have already told you a little bit about what working with dialogues looks like in our article about Mr. Riggs’ voice. We have worked with three voice actors on The Riftbreaker so far: Francesca Meaux as Ashley, Ryan Laughton as Mr. Riggs, and Tori Kamal as Colonel Norstrom from the prologue mission and the X-Morph consciousness. Audio technology is so good and affordable these days that we can collaborate with our actors fully remotely. We send them dialogue lists with all the lines we need them to read. The actors record the lines on their home audio equipment and send us a WAV file. We cut the file into samples and put it in the game - simple as that!
The “Into the Dark” DLC added a new difficulty modifier to this model. We added another character with dialog lines in the form of the Anoryx Worm. However, we decided to experiment a little. We knew we wanted the creature’s voice distorted and otherworldly. This allowed us to ignore the fact that none of us are native speakers of English and record the audio ourselves, as all the minute details in pronunciation would not be nearly as noticeable. Our volunteer for the task was voidreaver. He waited until everyone left the office to come up with the silliest voice he could muster. This is the raw result:
Obviously, this was not ready to be put into the game. We have done some research on how we can make void sound like a monster and discovered a sound-processing plugin that was quite promising. The plugin could transform any sound in a couple of ways with just a few turns of a virtual knob. Here’s a short presentation of how it works:
After we dialed in a sound that we liked, we added a couple of additional effects to make the sound a bit more ‘ethereal’ and ‘otherworldly’ (a very specific set of qualities, isn’t it?). We think that the end result was pretty okay for a first attempt - let’s see if we repeat this in the future!
We could talk about a million more things, but let’s leave some content for the future! We hope you learned something new today about the often underappreciated world of game audio. Let us know what other aspects of game development you’d like to read about! We’re waiting for your comments here and on our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. We’d also like to invite you to our streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios every Tuesday and Thursday - we’re going to start previewing the new biome from World Expansion III next week (hopefully), along with our regular co-op progress previews.
See you soon!
EXOR Studios