Hello everyone! My name is Daniel and I am the resident sound designer for Grimoire: Manastorm. I am going to talk a bit about different games I have used for inspiration thus far. In the realm of sound design, the sound of magic (in my opinion!) is one of the more difficult types of sound to create. You have to create a sound for something that doesn't actually exist in the real world, but it still needs to sound very organic and alive to "feel" right. When I joined the project I went and looked at a few different games that I thought might have some good magic sound design and sort of analyzed them. I listen to all the various sounds and try to come up with ideas for source material they used to create them. A lot of the core source material for magic are: whooshes, chimes, bells, musical instruments, etc with post processing effects. Other organic layers are intertwined depending on the type of spell being created (fire, wind, water, etc).
Here's a few of the games I looked at:
I looked at Guild Wars 2 because:
1. Guild Wars 2 in general has incredible sound and a very well mixed soundscape.
2. It's a good example of magic SFX working very well in a multiplayer environment with a lot of players casting the same spells.
GW2 takes a very minimalistic, clean approach to the magic sound design. None of their SFX are overly dramatic and always hit the mark just right. In contrast to Grimoire, Guild Wars 2 has a much more light hearted feel to it in general. The sounds in Grimoire will end up being a bit darker.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is very similar in the fact that none of the spells are overly dramatic. The entire mix of Skyrim is on the quieter side of gaming. I mainly looked at Skyrim because Grimoire has a very similar style of first person combat.
Dragon's Dogma - Youtube.com
I have never actually played Dragon's Dogma, but it does have some fantastic sounding spells. It sounds VERY different than most games and is a really great magic reference in general. Dragon's Dogma was created by Capcom which likely greatly influenced the sound design direction as well.
In the future I will be writing updates showing how I create specific magic sounds for Grimoire: Manastorm and will try to highlight each class. I also intend to dive a bit into the creation of a couple of level ambiences. The Grimoire team has a lot in store for the game in the coming months and hope everyone will keep up to date with us.
-Daniel
