One of the biggest challenges around audio is making sure all the effects work in harmony with each other, with the game art and even with the gameplay. This theme is long and complex!
Talking about the Forge Commander’s SFX, the creation is focused on making the player immerse in Skydome’s universe, rewarding the player when needed and most important of all — on helping the players with audio feedbacks. When well used these can even better the player performance during matches!
Groma’s smashing blow!
We begin by analyzing the game mechanics of the skill, once we know how it all works we can define the audio mechanisms. On the case of Groma’s crushing blow we have the three steps which we already talked about on the VFX post. First there’s her weapon’s movement in the air, followed by the dull impact of it crushing the floor, together with the possibility of a vocalization from both Groma and any unlucky enemies in the middle. The vocalizations and the voice acting are a topic for a new post, though!
With the audio mechanisms set, we now know how many effects to create and their behaviors. We make use of a number of tools and resources to create the effects themselves, from recordings to sound databases, which when properly used and mixed can create an effect that’s new and original.
Swooosh! Her weapon moving.
Thump! The impact of the weapon hitting the floor.
After creating the effects it’s time to integrate them into the game, during this step we make use of a middleware called FMOD. It’s in this middleware that we set the behaviors of the SFX and do any future maintenance if needed, afterwards it’s time for the programmers to dispatch the effects in the right time.
Both sounds implemented with the skill, without any ambience, music, voice or other sounds.
And lastly we test it to check if the effects work well with everything else in the game. Working the mixing, adjusting the volume and other characteristics until everything is sounding good!
Although well summarized, this processes helps understand the work around the creation of sound effects. Thanks for joining us today and we hope that you enjoyed this peek on Skydome’s development!
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See you next time!
