All Style, All Substance: The Audio Journey of the Vanity and Traversal System for Sunset Overdrive

[Music] starting over I'm Kristen qui V I work at Microsoft Studios I was the publishing sound supervisor on sunset overdrive and my name is Brian Higa I'm the sound designer at obsidian entertainment formerly of Microsoft and I was the associate sound supervisor on sunset overdrive first and foremost we want to give a huge call out to the insomniac audio team and we'll talk a little bit how we collaborated with them how we worked with them throughout this entire process but they have an amazing team down in Burbank headed up by Paul mudra their audio director and white oak ahora yeah did it good is their audio lead and a bunch of other amazing sound designers next is a look at the Microsoft audio staff that ended up working on sunset at any given point in

time throughout the project and a little bit about how we work during sunset overdrive I was a part of a Content services group there and we have a bunch of audio directors sound supervisors and sound design staff and we will scale and do basically distributed development depending on project needs so we took on certain aspects of the sunset overdrive audio production as well as just assist in whatever area is possible throughout the production so a quick intro just for those who don't know what is sunset yes okay I get a show of hands of everyone that's played sunset overdrive sweet awesome well for the people that haven't played I'll explain a little bit so basically a sunset overdrive is an open world third-person action shooter adventure set in the austin pocalypse the visco corporation has poisoned the population and turned into instant mutants so you have to shoot jump fight and just kill your way out of it and in

one piece so when we first got on the project we we decided we wanted to create standards or audio pillars and with the person we went on was we wanted to be unique iconic and identifiable one of the joys of this working on his project was it was a completely new IP so we had to figure out you know what's the sound of sunset overdrive what's the language of audio and it was it was a joy to try to figure out exactly how we wanted to Sam so we wanted to make sure that players whenever he listened to this sounds like they're these are new sounds that they've never heard before we wanted to make sure that sunset was iconic so when the next pillar was the amplifies gameplay we always want to make sure that the the moves that the player did was always fun and humorous and dynamic we wanted to make sure that the players choices were fulfilled through the audio and then the next one the next one is excels in high production value and this is something that we all try to achieve and we just wanted to make sure that along with the systems that were in place that we were working on we just want to make sure that all the systems in sunset or has

held to a high bar of standard and then lastly we want to be culturally relevant so we want to we wanted to introduce we wanted to introduce contextual and non-literal moments in the in the mix just to kind of amplify the gameplay and make it sound more fun and kind of reach into the psyche of the player to reach in to gather emotions that they would feel and so here's a trailer for sunset overdrive before this whole thing started just floated through life I know this is gonna sound crazy but my life didn't start until the world came to an end [Music]

all right nerds persons now I sense some epic missions in my future together we'll take this go down or we won't but we'll get some wicked respawn animations what a [ __ ] yeah I meant you

[Music] so we just thought we'd break down some of the audio systems that Microsoft helped support the insomniac team with we did a lot of coverage on some of the beso deed we help support UI content and ingame pickups we worked with HDR and really collaborated highly with them to deep dive into this we'll go a little bit into more detail on this later but it was very much a new system to us so a lot of learnings there we helped support some additional cinematic content and as well as some music support for the interactive system and Robert riddle Hall a programmer on our side and polyps and collaborated with Paul mudra on that but the two systems we really wanted to focus all focus around the hero we spent a lot of time building out really we like to use the hero as a starting point

for any one of our productions because it's something that's really persistent throughout the game it's something that tends to come on really early online in production and we really think you know it's a experience that really glues you into your environment so two of the systems we ended up focusing on which is your Loa or what we call your level of Awesome and this was basically a style tier based system they had an in-game style meter that would change based on combos you were pulling off in the game how you were pulling off attack moves against your traversal and you would level up and we wanted to create a more dynamic interactive experience and make the player feel more powerful as they progressed another system we're gonna focus on is the vanity system there's a ton of our assets in that game as anyone who's played it knows ton of different outfits for the player and we thought this was a really great opportunity to really like make players decisions

matter and so we decided to focus on getting as many different sounds as we could and making each individual sound as unique as possible something I always like to look at because I like looking at numbers and graphs is take a comparison as to where we are where we were versus where we are and basically what you're seeing here is a breakdown of the number of assets that we had on crackdown 2 which i think is a very similar project open-world experience and essentially that totaled with a DLC pack about thirteen thirteen thousand assets and then the center graph what you're looking at is essentially a breakdown of the number of assets that we created for the hero alone for sunset overdrive and that was ten thousand assets between vanity footsteps and your Loa and what you're looking at on the right was an all up the number of assets

that ended up in our originals directory on sunset overdrive and while probably not a hundred percent accurate on the number of sounds that shipped in the game it goes to show how many assets got imported into the project at any given point in time I also like to talk about a breakdown of our schedule and how long it actually took us to build all that content because it was a lot of content so basically Loa took us about two months and the we ended up for vanity and footsteps a total of six months we ended up having to do three full hero passes on all the animation sets there were a bunch of different animations that's broken out for the average male female characters a heavyset male hero and essentially the LOA vanity and footstep system all tied into basically an animation tagging system and really piggybacked on one another in terms of the implementation we ended up taking

about 15 days to do a full pass on just tagging animations in the project and we ended up four and we'll talk a little bit more about this for the vanity they had a configuration file for every piece of clothing that you could wear and we had to go tag every one of those to be able to drive our appropriate switches and switch containers and that took two days for shift assets in the project just a quick breakdown of what we ended up building 4520 assets just for vanity and clothing pieces 5633 footstep assets which seems like a lot but it's awesome we ended up supporting you know tons of materials as well as shoe types and will deep dive that a little bit more and that totaled over ten thousand one hundred and sixty one assets just on the hero alone so

next we want to talk about how we started our creative process so much like how artists have storyboards where they can concept their art on a page on the wall we wanted to do something similar with audio so we had audio previous storyboards and so when we first started doing this we collaborated and with insomnia for many weeks like many phone calls and we were trying to come up with different concepts and genres that we kind of wanted to feel out with what you thought the sound of sunset overdrive should be so the first one we decided on was we wanted to do a gritty fantasy world so this was kind of like a Tim Burton Harry Potter dark fantasy feel the next one we wanted work on was rich oh super hero and we were this was heavily influenced by the movie Scott Pilgrim so like plucked very big moments non contextual or contextual moments and retro 8-bit sounding audio and lastly we wanted to do humorous horror and we wanted this to be ultra violent and gory but with this cartoonish flair to it so what she fit well it was two of them actually we went

with retro superhero and humorous horror we really thought the mixture of both these honors added to the direction of the style direction we wanted with the systems that we worked on so in this video we're gonna it's actually just an audio so you don't to see anything but in this video we're going to play those two genres and at the beginning of each one we introduced the traversal movements with the Foley and then we introduced characters enemies in combat

oh yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so in the in that audio thank you just if you could hear at the very end we had those really contextual moments with the bells and then the music playing so

that's kind of what the idea we wanted to transfer back into the game so after that we moved onto the design documentation we put in and this is pretty much taking the systems that we had and setting high-level goals for each of everything for that system and from there we had to think of all right so we have a high level goal and then how do we execute that so it's how technically how can we achieve this high level goal and from there once we had our system in place and designed we went to execution and this basically just came down to what need to be designed and what need to be fully and so this leads us to our next portion of the talk the LOA system so your level of Awesome so the question that kind of arose when we got to this is like how do you feel how do you like the player feel more powerful and awesome as they traverse through the world one of the gameplay mechanics that really stood out to us was the gameplay it was the was the traversal mechanic and we really wanted to we really brainstormed and thought about how we can highlight this through the audio so we had lots of influences and lots of games that we loved to play so we including Assassin's Creed series

Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia we played a lot of these games and we really thought you know these were these were like kind of the benchmark in terms of the movement for the player and we wanted to add sunset overdrive to that list so interesting enough early on a development the basic idea this style meter came online and this is just basically as you as a player traverses and through the world they gain style points and so when they're melee and fighting as they get more style points they've graduated to the next level over there of their style and once that happened once we saw that we were like oh that's that's let's tune in on that it felt like that was a good moment where we can highlight that through audio and that's how kind of level of awesome was born so that we go back to the question like how do we let the player feel more awesome and powerful as they traverse the world so we answer that by utilizing wises switch event system to change completely the audio of players movements as they gain levels in their cycle tier

so the next the next thing we talk about is our design goals for the level of Awesome system and the main goal we wanted to achieve was we wanted to have silos gameplay feedback as a player traverse through the world when you start off the game you just you start at level zero it's this kind of the from the get-go and we just wanted to make this kind of kind of intimate and realistic so it's just realistic Foley no added movement only maybe in certain places where we wanted to emphasize some movement but it's just kind of basic but then as we went to level one we wanted to introduce our next design goal which was having cinematic content so we just wanted to add more weight and more of that cinematic flair to the movement just to make that with the movement more exciting and then once the player hits level 2 we I wanted to have another layer of fun so we had to fill out the audio spectrum and so we added a an old-school ninja movie style a style audio so really high like nice high-end

swishes just to give more speed to the player as they're traversing and then we had lastly level three once you hit that your max level we had the we wanted to introduce retro 8-bit style audio with hyper realistic cartoon realism we and we like to call that organic cartoon realism but lastly our last goal we wanted to make sure that we kept everything clean and it did included the experience because that you know with all the the scope that we wanted to fulfill that was the danger of we had a danger of kind of cluttering everything so we want to make sure that everything was clear to synced and felt good so here's our design matrix for the level three awesome this is this is this was the level where we kind of have a lot more fun because we could add things that normal games wouldn't play in their audio so how do we make the game sound more fun and awesome well we were heavily influenced by the classic Looney Tunes I'll audio so like when you're watching Bugs Bunny and they're they're hitting each other there's like lots of percussive sounds kind of these

non-literal moments just to kind of sell the the humor and the fun-ness of the cartoon so we wanted to take that that influence and that style and apply it to sunset overdrive so we really had to figure out you know what's the language of level three awesome for sunset overdrive well we wanted to make sure that the motions involved on the left side of the screen you can see we had we listed every single action the player can take while they're traversing and we wanted to see what audio can we can we add to the sound to kind of sell that motion so for for example when the player is falling from the great distance you know when you're at level zero one two it's just it's just kind of fully flapping some wind in the air but when you hit level three we added a jet the sound of a kind of a Shepherd's cone jet falling sound just to kind of have that fun moment when you're following four vaulting we added more of the the speed of kind of ricocheting off of an object so we just took the old-style Western kind of bullet ricochet and added that in the mix just to kind of

help sell that motion and make the make that motion more fun and so and lastly we we had we really want to put that 8-bit retro feel to the game but we wanted to pick the moments that we can do the most damage or make the make the most influence in the game so we added them to the big moments in combat so impacts yeah impacts and then when you when are falling from great height we decided to have the land sounds with this we added an 8-bit flare to the actual impact of the land so some of the tools that we used to achieve the 8-bit style audio was the plug-in ship sounds it's a really awesome plugin that we love to use we use an Opie one which is just a really awesome synth that we like I need an excuse to buy it so this was a great excuse to to use for work but basically you can take sounds it's almost like an affordable hard drive where you can take sounds and source and put it in there and just kind of just

destroy and have fun with with the set so we had a lot of fun with that and also we use a lot of source from the sci-fi boom library so here's a quick glimpse of the wise data structure for a level of Awesome on the left side you can see one of the things we wanted to make sure we achieve in chaos squad which is sunset OverDrive's multiplayer mode all the characters use the same hero events so we wanted to make sure that we were able to switch between when the remote player was playing sounds and when the local player was playing sounds because we only want to hear you when you're playing you would only want to hear the level awesome sounds on the player and not on other players because they would just come it would just Clare to the mix so as you can see we had a local remote switch for the first level and then underneath that we actually had the level of awesome system so on the right side you can see we had our sounds for air - and exit this example for level 0 1 2 & 3 from there we set our switch type of that group to level of awesome

or Loa and we just set our switch our default switch so Noel away and from there we can assign the different containers to the switches for each level awesome and here is the video showcasing our level awesome system [Applause] [Music]

[Music] [Music]

Thanks so another core element in the traversal system was grinding insomniac worked very heavily on this to create a really cool material but like switching based system for when you're grinding on Rails versus you know wood railway ways and things of that nature but really kind of late in production we ended up we ended up wanting to create a more interactive experience but we were actually postcode complete so we couldn't get any additional engineering time so Christopher Mel Roth one of our audio directors and Jeffrey Don Kowski is an extremely talented sound designer at Microsoft ended up setting up an entirely event-driven RTP see changing

value for when you're grinding and this would drive a yacht our TPC value of a minus 92 positive 90 value when you're under grinding so depending on the angle of the the player-character you would be able to drive things like EQ changes or things of that nature just to get a little bit of a more interactive experience and help make it feel better we also drove pitch changes based on the horizontal speed of the player so as you're doing your grind boost you get that sense of really speeding up and we also did gain changes between high and low loops so as you would start to increase speed we could bring in a more intense sound that made you feel like you were going faster so here's kind of a look at our wise data structure you can see we have a top switch container that would then drive material switches

and then if we looked at that top level container we were driving make up gain changes as well as pitch changes to get that increased speed that we were talking about we also drove EQ changes at that container level and essentially we would drive to different gains on two different bands and this is how the our TPC looked on the EQ and here's an example of how that ended up turning out in-game but I just want to stress the amount of work that went in to get this in the game because you have to imagine every single grinding animation having to have a unique sound event set up that would essentially go what do I need this y'all are TPC value to be and how fast do I need it to change and here's the video

[Applause] [Music] [Music] all right just to wrap up this portion of the talk little awesome we want to talk about are we happy well I think we're really happy with the way it turned out we know it's working you can really hear it and I think it's really rewarding for the player the player that's you know doing the making fun or having fun and you know traversing and commenting together it almost ear Awards him for being

awesome and it also kind of incentivizes them to keep that style tier higher so they can have that fun factor just always going some of the things we could have hit up so one of the things we really wanted to support that was one of our core designs was being able to track the end of grind rails and to also have a lead-in when you're about to make an impact on the ground so we just wanted to we wanted to have that extra players feedback just let them know hey I need to I need to stop grinding and move on to something else and also had that cinematic player as if when they're about to hit a hit the ground we get that a nice little woosh this was a this was a hard go tracking task that if we had maybe another month maybe two maybe less we probably could have shaved but we just have ran out of time so we didn't get to hit it yep so then one thing we would have done a little differently is I think we would have had even more fun with the level 3 content we would have had more contextual and non-literal moments what the consensus was with the team was that with our

original previous videos was that it added too much of a comical element to the to the game and so we were kind of trying to achieve a more mature style game but after the reception of the fans and the players how how much they loved the style of the game we really think we could have gone a little bit more maybe just had more fun with the style to make the system more distinguishable so the next thing we want to talk and that leads us into our vanity system the vanity system there was a really heavy emphasis even from the beginning of the project to just be who you are they really want to support the players freedom and they the art team did such an amazing job and insomniac creating just so much different unique content that the player can wear and we really wanted to showcase that case this so what did that mean for audio so we ended up creating a limb based switching system to be able to support all the different unique configurations the outfits that you

could actually put on what that meant is we ended up having different switch groups and we could have switchable content based on your torso your torso front which was essentially like jewelry or necklaces your torso back if you put on a backpack we would support your your legs your arms your waist your feet all of that was could be uniquely changed at any given point in time the nice thing about this system was that we we we built it in a way that the pipeline was really effective and efficient and actually didn't require a ton of code support so a lot of people are used to coders having to go to drive all their unique switches anytime you need a new one added but insomniac was able to build a system for us that enabled the designers to be able to go and add switch groups or drive switches anytime we wanted on any unique piece of clothing at any given point in time so

audio design goals for this system we wanted the hero to be unique based on whatever outfit they were wearing we really wanted to push how many different sounds we could get out of different clothing types which is harder than it sounds a lot of materials end up sounding very similar and the same so we really worked hard to try and just create as much unique and identifiable content as possible we wanted the audio to always mirror the choices that the player was making we really think the player matters we really want to make them feel like their decisions are important and that that drives the experience of what they're having and we wanted to support a high level of detail through the hero actions so as you'll see in a bit we supported a lot of different behaviors that were completely configurable depending on which pieces of clothing you wanted to support any given point in time what

this meant we ended up supporting about nine different behaviors on your hands one for your arms when you're falling and flailing in the air and about sixteen different behaviors for any other limbs that we supported material switching on the feet as well as shoe type we also wanted to ensure that the pipeline was was really quick and efficient we wanted to make sure that our designers were spending more time in the studio focusing on content rather than working in the tools to have to just hook up the content because it was a very large number of assets we also wanted to ensure that your audio would prioritize based on visibility the the in you know sunset had a system where you could have an undershirt on a shirt on and then a jacket on top of that so we wanted to make sure that our switches were always switching appropriately when you were taking on and off clothing and would fall back appropriately to

whatever you had had on previously so what did this look like and the number of content that we ended up supporting here's an excel list of all the number of different clothing pieces that we ended up supporting we use this as a status tracking tool as well at any given point in time I could come see what was edited what was currently in game who was in charge of it and also add notes because I like to give feedback all the time apparently there's also this is an example of what our footstep tracking would have looked like we had a Status page that was in the front same same kind of deal you can see if it's something had been mastered if it was final in the game and then each one of the below tabs is basically an asset list for that material and this is kind of a short snippet of what it might have looked like for the sneakers and bare feet on asphalt and we would always have images

so that the designers could see exactly what the material looked like for when they went in to record we also had a color coding system so we could track the state of what asset was exactly in-game final needed to get redone what what was implemented but temp content or what was you know what needed to get redone so Brian got to spend a lot of time with some of our other designers in the foley studio so here's an example of some some of those images yeah so here's another picture you can see our family of shoes we had six different shoes that we use throughout the whole project and I lived in the Foley room for three months two months where it was the Foley Oh two months was the footsteps and then the last month was all just the vanity clothes so some of the things that we learned when we were trying to perform the footsteps we initially thought okay let's you know actually put shoes on our feet you know that's that's what you

would think but since we had ten different actions we really wanted to make sure that each action wasn't wasted we wanted to make sure that each action really exemplified that movement so run sound like runs jump sound like jumps and so on and we really couldn't achieve that with just our feet so we hand performed all of our footsteps and so we had lots of stinky hands for three months but yet so we did that with all of us and one of the other things we learned was mic placement we used in 80/40 and a 416 as you can see in the picture for since some of the materials that we use were a lot quieter and some sometimes we had to get more detail we really had to kind of just crank that mic up to or whatever we were recording especially for the vanity assets this goes against some of us I mean we got some advice and people say like you know you should be a set length away and we soon discovered that there was no rules than bogs we just had to get the right sound so yeah and here's another picture of just our beautiful messy folder so quick breakdown on some of the details

in the beginning for vanity we wanted to support 51 unique clothing types so very ambitious but by the time we we'd actually ended up scaling it down to about 29 reason being like as much as we wanted to and tried we just couldn't get that distinction between certain materials another reason was that actually some of our recordings turned out a little bit noisier than I would have liked so we decided to Aksum even using our X advance to try and clean stuff up for our footsteps we ended up in the beginning trying to support 30 unique surfaces across six different shoe types but by the time we shipped we ended up scaling it down to about 13 unique surfaces but still supporting six shoe types some of the reasons why we ended up cutting some of the footstep content was some of the surfaces weren't actually flagged on from an art side so we weren't actually hearing them in-game

and based on how we were loading our bank content into the project it was we would load a shoe type as a bank so you would basically get one shoe across all surfaces loaded in and a given point in time and we wanted to get some of that memory back so we ended up cutting some things we went through multiple pipeline iterations when working on the vanity system starting with each one of the implementation passes we would start as building a proof of concept to see what the pipeline looked like in game yeah so as you can see we had some lofty goals and some big ideas and so our first pass we did we did a complete passing all the hero animations with a complete outfit something that was kind of the default outfit that in the game so just the top pants shoes and some accessories with the player and once we were tagging the animations we realized that it wasn't our initial implementation wasn't limb based at all it was based on animation

tags per limb so this required about nine different steps to actually tag animations through the through the animation and that we also had to have deal with something with similar to unreal kismet scripting for each article of clothing and then for each new behavior that we wanted to support we had to have Co support so you know as you can see like with our scope of the game we wouldn't be able to complete the game with with the way we implemented it and also with those nine different different tags that times were a little bit different for age and so we wanted to make sure that we can have all of them play all at all at once so that the human ear can hear everything in one fluid motion yeah I want to really stress the amount of time we took editing down to even the millisecond to ensure that all our assets would always layer properly for if you had a single action if you would jump you your your content for your legs and your content for your torso had to be in lockstep in order to feel natural so for a second past implementation we kind of went back

to the drawing board and flew down to Burbank and worked really closely with their team Hershel Bailey gave us a lot of help when trying to get this set up in game and we basically stripped it down so that we could drive switches based on a single a single event so we would have multiple switch containers for our switch groups and what this enabled us to do was define when we wanted to create a new behavior say it was a swing behavior say we wanted to hear the torso pieces but not the leg pieces we would just assign all the limb pieces that you wanted to hear and exclude the the leg switch group from that event here's I think we ended up with something a lot cleaner they had a vanity configuration files in the game and essentially they just added text fields so we could go in and we could assign whatever switch group name we wanted applied to that piece of clothing

and what switch would get assigned to it and we could actually apply multiple switch groups and switches to a single piece of clothing so if we had say a backpack we could add just a like a cloth piece or a canvas piece as well as like a jingle of more of the chain from and we could we could drive the both those sounds at the same time here's a look at some of our vanity data structures what you're seeing here is just a list of our switch groups and our game sinks and then what you're going to what you're seeing on the right hand side is just all of the clothing pieces that we end up supporting and driving for just your legs alone what we're looking at next I realize this might be small but I wanted to show it because this is a list of every single switch for any piece of movement that the player would have played and essentially you could imagine when you look at the top the top image that are those are the switch containers that would have to be applied on an

event just for that one behavior so you would end up with five switch groups assigned to a single event and what you're looking at and the in the bottom image is a breakdown of the switch that would drive the clothing pieces again just on the legs and here is an example of a video showing how the vanity system turned out in-game oh honey it looks like you're wearing a poor person costume

[Music]

[Music] we also want to show a little bit of our footstep data structure because we hadn't the added challenge of dealing with material based switching so on the left side you can see our foots if events for each different action you could take and we own here we see looks like we have ten different actions and so we were able to set the the first switch to shoe type and we had the default set to sneaker and then on the next slide you can see our switches based on the the different shoe type and from there we had the action based so this was run and then on the right side under the run switch event we had every single surface in the game playing and here's a video of the foot steps in action

[Applause] [Music]

so just to wrap up the the portion of the talk where we're talking about vanity we again want to talk about if we're happy with it there are definitely things that I would do differently if I were to go back and do it again overall I think we're pretty happy with the amount of detail we were able to support in the project again this is just a glimpse of a few of the outfits that we were able to support but you know ultimately I think we could have stayed in lockstep with the art team better there were definitely some are items that came into the game that I would have absolutely just killed to support like gesture shoes with bells missed opportunity for me but also I think I would have scaled back on some of the behaviors that we were supporting and just tried to spend more time playing with our different materials to get more

unique sounds out of them and really distinguish them but I always want people always ask about this I do have some really funny photos that we should have included in the picture slide of Brian and some high heels I would have loved to have done that everyone always asks about the memory because it's a lot of content so I thought I'd do a quick breakdown of some of our memory structure information so LOA and vanity just for data structure alone ate up 1.2 megabytes the footsteps structure memory just for all our data was 1.6 total data structure two point eight eight Meg's and when we look at some of our media support one shoe type across all surfaces was about two megabytes you could and multiplayer end up with your worst case scenario of having all the shoes loaded in any given point in time so worst case scenario was actually 14 Meg's this wasn't really I

don't think a problem for us because enough stuff got unloaded during chaos squad from the single-player experience that it wasn't making a huge dent the vanity for one outfit ate up two point eight five Meg's and this is with a full full outfit loaded and here's kind of a breakdown if you're going to look at the memory based on a per limb structure and I'll kind of run through this a little bit quicker 0.68 for the bone necklace 0.33 for the jeans 0.57 for a backpack and 0.53 for a t-shirt and then our chain belt was 0.7 for again this is like our worst case offenders for each limb piece and that totaled out to 2.8 five Meg's something else I like to talk about when we talk about sunset is HDR which is a which was new to us and Weiss

is their high dynamic range mix system you know several games have been using it now including infamous I think shipped with it and dice did a talk on their own HDR system that they built a couple years back essentially we had to deep dive to this and really figure out how it was working and wise and we collaborated very intensely with the insomniac team Chris Cole and ER I want to call him Cole Lander every time Chris Olander his alias is calendar so I'm used to calling him that but he helped we really looked at investigating how exactly this was working we ended up rebuilding our our HDR system three different times throughout the production of the game but basically we ended up with a category based system so we were able to define what we wanted to certain categories and it was really based around the loudness so if something loud happens in the game and you want it to

push out you're quieter moments that's exactly what this is good for HDR system was really perfect for a game like sunset and an open world experience where you just don't always know what kind of scenarios are going to end up occurring in the game but the two categories we ended up driving it with of course is voice value voice volume ends up driving the HDR priority within wise but also we had to look at our reverb sins and kind of come up with a category system that worked in lockstep with how we were using our voice volumes in the game because this is this is additive volume and it impacts the priority in the HDR system we were observing so here's a breakdown of how we broke out all our different categories in the game and you can see it was based on things we wanted to be really loud versus just baseline content and you can see on the right how we ended up driving our attenuation so if something ended up being applied to the

loudest category and you went to look at its attenuation and the reverb send in there it would be set to minus 3 at max so when we were approaching this there were definitely some challenges along the way yeah so as you can imagine we had one of the things was just keeping it all cohesive we've had three months of Foley recordings but we didn't needed to make sure that it sounded like we recorded in one day so we had a very strict guideline to the to the timing so we were down to the millisecond we measured where our peak was in the file and we had to make sure every single file kept this the strict guideline that we did so we use a lot of Adobe Audition just to get to that granular level for the timing and then we also had to make sure that you know once we were done with the vanity and elle' way that these two systems kind of merge together and played well so we had to kind of carve out time and space for each one to be heard not to overpower the mix we also experienced some changing style goals

through development this was kind of a new thing for me being at Microsoft we did a lot of you are testing which is very common across our games but it was the first time that I'd gotten a really a lot of feedback around audio sunset was going for amateur rated game and we were getting feedback that some of the more you know fourth wall breaking contextual but not literal content was lending itself to being a little kitty or a little team teen based like Brian said earlier so we really had to be careful about how we approach that and we ended up moving more towards like trying to go for more of a Hollywood cinematic design with really light flavors of more of the 8-bit content to try and help keep it set in more of this like mature rated game working with tools off-site can always be a challenge for us we're based in Redmond up at Microsoft and this is something we've

been doing for a good while now taking tools that are typically built in studios and taking them off site and working with them and insomniac games was they were amazing at supporting us and getting the pipeline set up off-site they were passing us exe s and code builds to constantly be running the game against they were doing sharing sessions with us we're like we do desktop sharing sessions so they can help us see the issues that we were running into on our side so ultimately it was a great experience and they're a wonderful team to collaborate with and they're very creative and they have an amazingly talented audio department and they're actually giving a talk on Friday on open world audio I think Dwight and Herschel so please if you're interested in sets that audio please go check that out and then that's pretty much our talk on the sunset audio for vanning room

[Music] Thanks if anyone has any questions anyone has questions to step up to the mic yes thank you did you find yourself recycling any of your imported assets in wise by using things like plugins RT PC whenever you could you know like let's say you wanted to change the floor from metal to wood would you use a reverb for that or were you very strict on having a fresh piece of Foley we were very much fresh Foley we didn't necessarily do a lot with on the processing side to get more variation but what we ended up doing was sharing content from piece to piece if we weren't getting enough like enough of a distinction between it we would share for example for example a lot of the footstep stuff we did scuffs push offs things like that and when you're going from like a loafer to a sneaker and really it's just a kind of slide motion you're not getting a super material

based on the shoe but there were definitely like more hard transient actions that were definitely unique per shoe so we would keep those and share more generic experiences also soft surfaces like grass and things like that we shared assets across all the shoe types cool thank you yeah hey guys thank you so you touched a little bit on your file memory sizes for these limb systems in the vanity system I was wondering if you had any specific tricks that you guys might have pulled off to maybe keep those sound banks from eating up all of your memory and maybe how that may be influenced to your process sure we ended up being able to pretty much load and unload all the vanity pieces uniquely because you're always in an in-game menu so essentially that's why we broke it out per sorry per material piece so like I could load in a jacket just

independently in the menu so we didn't have to carry all our vanity banks at the same time cool thank you yeah hey guys hi first I just want to say as a guy who worked on a similar like infinite variation type game I appreciate the cope and care of what you guys have done and you made it look really easy to have all of these layers fitting together and switching and all making sense but I incredibly difficult job and it's so cool that you guys made time to just push the envelope in that direction because this is like the best movement system I've heard in a game in like basically forever so all that said is there anything that you wanted to even do for the movement system that you didn't get to I mean it seems like you basically you know ordered lunch and everything game so what any stuff you do for sunset to that like you just couldn't because he didn't have supporter yeah I think like Brian

mentioned the being able to track the end of the grind runs we really think it you know we wanted to help make that system feel really good and maybe you can speak more to the Whedon's yeah so one of the things we wanted to do was you can hook onto to the power lines and I'm going like a set distance and almost like if you press the button it kind of just leans and toward it so we wanted a sound almost like a magnetism type salad to let the player know that they executed this and they're gonna attach I just looked just four more players feedback and that was one thing that was along with that it was just a lot of hard code tracking that we just had didn't have the time to do it's it's more like games or it's really hard to be predictive right yeah that you're about to do something opposed to hey I'm doing this thing and a very the majority of the voice for our beso deeds standing right here asking questions that's awesome thanks yeah thank you props to talking rain Seltzer for

keeping me going a great talk I'm wondering if there are any unique challenges in terms of mixing and priority with the awesome and the vanity system how you you know dealt with that well yes is the answer HDR like I said we rebuilt it three times and I think HDR ended up driving the way we were really mixing the game though like where and why's you end up mixing really changes when you turn HDR on so instead of being able to just grab your slider that's on your you know front page when you click on an object you're now going into a menu over and dealing with a lot of makeup game and so we ended up like once our HDR rules were set you kind of don't want to mess with those so we really ended up going into and driving the mix through makeup game and we also

learned there are multiple places that you can apply makeup gain so that was some like interesting gotchas cuz there's makeup gain settings on the object level as well as the source level and so we were finding that people occasionally would edit the makeup gain in two places and we're like why is this so loud like so it was really digging into a granular level about what was exactly going on and there's just becoming a lot of gain stages I think in wise that are becoming awesome because it gives you a lot of freedom but also you have to really come up with some strict rules about how you want to keep yourself organized and not kind of back yourself into a corner right do you start your buses at perhaps a lower level to give you more Headroom yeah we did so as you can see we were obviously cranking up things above zero but also with HDR really that's a depending on what your ratio settings are that's a hard cap and so anything that like looks

like it's gonna be at plus 15 is not actually playing it plus 15 it's just saying I'm the loudest thing that's supposed to be playing right now and stops at zero so yeah we ended up turning down I think our or HDR bus as well as our master buss above that and we tried to meet our loudness all through and mix two loudness standard of -23 so hopefully hopefully we achieve that can I just got a quick follow up it more for the awesome stuff was that always action based or was there some sort of sequencing or event based triggers so that they would be more ran and so they're meant to be fun and sort of arbitrary I guess oh yeah we just set these up in random containers based and tagged to the animation and sometimes if it was more complicated we had to hook it up through code the only thing that worked really different was falling and it was more of a layered based system opposed to waste like switching system

like and I love that it's becoming all the awesome like we keep calling it that thanks great talk I was really curious as to like whenever you first started out like developing all like your ideas for the game with such like a huge volume of sounds that you're gonna have to like come up with and like record like Brian what were you thinking when that you walked into the Foley closet like for the first time and you were like well I'm about to eat sleep live it here for the next like three months like it's like your mental process to kind of like be okay like short version I can go into more detail but short version which is compartment just breaking things into chunks and make sure that we were things kind of lined up evenly so I didn't I didn't worry about Oh 30 surfaces what you know just yeah I kind of did it chunk by chunk week by week and it's kind of yeah so if

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