'Dark Pictures: Season 1': 4 games in 4 years: Audio Systems for Narrative Horror

[Music] thank you so my name is Barney Pratt I am Senior audio director at supermassive Games been there for 14 years a long time I've helped build a lot of the audio systems with a lot of help from different people over time that we're going to be looking at today and it's that kind of cinematic audio DNA that makes supermassive special and we're expanding on it all the time and this talk will focus on just some of the systems within that kind of cinematic DNA that have enabled us to release annual AAA content for the dark pictures and as you'll see a lot of these systems have as much a place in the open world as they do in cinematic games everything I'm presenting today wouldn't be possible without a great team we are 18 sound designers it's huge at the moment and plus a production manager to help us organize with an added composer

Jason Graves who were lucky to have in the audience today so any music questions later maybe Point them in his Direction More than mine but we can share them tonight um so uh yeah it's an ever-evolving team quick word about supermassive games we're back to winning a studio founded in 2008 350 plus individuals so we're pretty big now we're based in Guildford UK we've had critical claim for both cinematic and VR uh multi-platform multi-format and we support a lot of UK Charities including games Aid we've been lucky enough to receive a bunch of nominations and awards including audio tech and a lot of good critical Acclaim for audio over time standouts were bafta for best original Ip and a nav GTR for the second in the dark pictures Anthology series for best audio in a game cinematic and we'll see why this award was so amazing because a

lot of the sound that we were being judged on there was systemic sound was procedural so it's a huge complement to those systems and also we're up for three gang Awards in about an hour um so uh fingers crossed sorry about that I just figured 5 30 on a Thursday everyone's gonna need a little pep call right so yeah there you go and the vampire will be making um an entry later on you'll be finding out more about him um so dark pictures Anthology what is it it's interactive branching horror uh wildly different narratives and locations Etc between each game uh there's a lot of exploration gameplay as well as the Cinematic uh there's single two multiplayer uh online offline couch Co-op and eight plus sorry eight games in total uh for the Anthology season one is made of the first four there's Mana Madan a little Hope House of ashes and the Devil in Me uh during these four years we were also

doing some several other things we onboarded and outsourced audio team for the Quarry and they did an amazing job that's Adele from sound cut so you might be here but maybe not um if you haven't checked out Corey's got a fantastic soundtrack as well we're working on some unannounced projects and last week we released a launch title for the PS VR2 called Switchback VR but we are not here to talk about those we're here to talk about the uh first for the season one of the dark pictures quick talk overview we're going to look at um branching now to design just briefly to kind of illustrate the challenges we have uh we'll look at procedural Foley and character sound these are like really Key Systems for uh for achieving the kind of cinematic characters uh we'll look at how they extend or bleed into Creature Foley and we'll look at how we World ice sounds some of the attenuations and we'll look at the interactive mix how we balance out all the Sounds playing in the game we'll also look at two Unique Systems one is an in-game runtime directional

microphone which was a gift to the sound team in the fourth of the dark pictures and we'll also look at diegetic music how we start it diegetically and then bleed it out to be full score for added drama so what do I mean by branching narrative I think everyone here is probably quite familiar with that concept now it's player agency to direct their narrative here's a kind of illustration of some of the logic flows that we have quick overview these green sections are sequenced sections unreal sequencer which are essentially short linear sequences um all in-game sequences not fmvs not videos so not the kind of standard cutscene stuff and then there are interactive sections highlighted here in red um these uh could be anything from a narrative Choice dilemma Choice combat Choice qte uh QuickTime event sorry um it's basically anything that leads to branching and then we have a bunch of exploration gameplay uh to consider as well um this

is not truly representative of how it looks in the logic flow but it's it's good enough for this talk so take a closer look at the what's contained in a single linear node or sequence these contain dialogue events sound effect spots we also draw in rtpc curves it's all the standard unreal secrets of stuff and the rtpc curves come in with the music later we also add an additional layer of linear Foley per character which is recorded as you would do to film there's no adaptation there in terms of the recording technique but it really is just a minimal addition to some of the systems it's anything we don't have systems for like a chair move a wall scrape from a character rope holding doors body falls and some added cloth for crawls and then across all of the sequences the interactive sections and the expiration is the systemic audio uh it's the same systems throughout all

of the gameplay aspects these include a character breath system exertion and fear responding to some of the game AI calls all the atmos 2D in 3D and all the music and sound design and by using systemic audio throughout all the gameplay areas this leads to a seamless experience and in fact seamless gameplay experience it maintains the immersion for the players it's kind of crucial for the for the games and the systemic audio includes a procedural Foley so all of our character Foley systems cloth footsteps acutes it's all movement based and it's fully systemic we invest really heavily in these systems incrementally updating them all the time and this gives us consistency throughout the sequences and exploration for character sounds we also rely on them to finish the product because we're doing a one-year turnaround and that gets a little bit tough towards the end if there's any edits so yeah we've had some huge huge advancements in this area so our aim is

to deliver cinematic audio experiences through systemic audio and this is going back to the award we won um against other games that were using kind of linear cutscene pipelines video playback it's not to take from there Excellence because there was some some big games that we were up against but it's obviously a huge complement to the systems that we're going to look at today which brings us neatly onto the first system procedural Foley um believable characters are key to our games we're making cinematic games uh Foley for us is a broad term it's essentially any contact the character makes with the environment so we're going to use House Of Ashes the third title in the series to Showcase some of the systems quick backstory um it's set at the close of the Iraq War May 2003 American special forces are searching for weapons of mass destruction we know how that went in fact they found a buried Sumerian temple

with unearthly creatures and much horror hilarity ensues and a quick shout out to Glenn and the crew at molinere in London uh for all their amazing work on the assets um that we're going to be hearing today so we systemize as much as possible why do we do this we know then that the majority of the Foley is covered it leads to easier filing as I said it's a one-year Dev cycle it's a time money stress saver and it's a win for multiple projects this is a long-term investment in these systems it's also actually essential for linear and exploration consistency we'll look at some gun Foley later which is really interesting the main systems are footsteps we have a walk and run based on character Speed playing back small files and we have additional subtlety brought in with a walk slow so as the characters come to a stop they are making you know

really nuanced subtle sounds all the way up to their stopping we've extended the system to these sideways movement scuffs and we use high velocity vertical movement on characters to play procedural Landing sounds all of these are surface specific we have something like 2630 surfaces per game and of course we extend this system into Creature foots a similar setup for cloth short samples based on bone distance and Bone parts of knee and elbow and we have akuts which are the super detailed kind of costume elements they could be combat belts jewelry anything that's a small addition we don't pass up on any opportunity for an added variety and subtlety and then there were the more bespoke elements um gun Foley was something we did new for our house of Ashes with three sets of samples all velocity triggered they're slow medium and fast again we're trying to get as much subtlety as

possible and a hand-packed system which I have to admit is still a bit of a work in progress but we've had some success with on off and slide and of course the creature wings uh Foley is an adaptation of these systems this is what the sound emitters uh look like attached to the character mesh we have eight emitters this head dialogue chest left and right hands knee and both feet so the emitters attractive run time they drive by drive rtpcs and switches in Wise and the idea is we're simulating natural performance so quick side note we switch to spatial audio for House of Ashes um so all the House Of Ashes Clips you'll see um as you'll hear um will be with full spatial audio and it was an absolutely amazing system and a great project to Showcase it on with huge cavernous spaces small tunnels portaling Etc was just fantastic but I'm not gonna talk

too much about that because it's wise at the Box system and there's a lot of information online but we did learn something from this we have to respect the CPU because with 80 meters per character often multiple characters thousands of API calls you've been there right um often like 50 enemy soldiers 11 friendlies eight vampires the vampires actually had 12 emitters each um all the switches itpc values diffraction values is it was uh way too much so it wasn't the spatial audio that caused it which is definitely part of the equation and we pushed it too hard so we created uh uh what's moving on to the next system really we created a culling system for events and emitters and this is a kind of um uh word of warning so it's not something everyone thinks of but it's it's based on a distance to listener this is kind of an illustration from in-game

so outside of their attenuation range um we could firstly call the events in case the emitters were needed uh later or then we could be even more hardcore than that we could just call the emitters and stop any updates uh being called for them this was really important during the busy combat scenes with multiple characters and also actually led to a less dense mix in some areas we use it to help us there and the biggest win and the biggest kind of learning we had from this was make this functionality platform specific so you can exempt a whole ton of stuff for Gen 8 consoles and leave it dense for Gen 9. uh so going back to procedural Foley uh we're going to look at footsteps first basically anim notifiers are just not a viable uh option with such a short cycle and all the local animations you know changing being updated all the way towards the end of the project so we needed a flexible system that would work with both Locomotion and mocap to keep consistency

and it's motion considerate using various rtpcs the core of it is emitter speed um so we extend this as I said before sideways movement scuffs vertical movement for Landings and we have an additional layer we include overlay detection for sweeteners such as debris or plaster on the floor maybe a puddle and let's take a listen to Just the footsteps solo from in-game thank you

okay moving on to procedural Foley handling as I mentioned before we had a bespoke system for House of Ashes which was gun Foley and we had prop handling for interactions and we had the hand packs um it's easy if I just play this let's listen to how they uh how they uh played back in game foreign

foreign thank you very cool um we've on some of the other systems the um or furthering this yeah into the cloth systems for ligonar movement a Coots again it's a more subtle close-up stuff um and we use the same tech for the kind of

clothing coot system for the creature wings as well so let's see how they sound like in-game solo all right [Music] foreign [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Music]

[Applause] skate in a very natural way okay creature Foley um why create procedural Foley for a creature well it gets a lot of screen time there's often multiple on the screen so track layer is not an option thousand plus unique sequences so we needed something again that gave us an infinite range of movement it was mainly keyframe there's a little bit of mocap thrown in there as well uh here's some amazing Concepts art that we looked at in the early days and as I said the vampire we're making an appearance later this is its moment here is a walk cycle example you can see it's quadruped not biped but it can also walk standing up hind legs like a horse with an extra joint it has wings and of course many of these features broke the

conventions of the human Foley system so we had to bash our heads together and adapt and see what we could get to so for the solutions the team adapted the human Foley foots and cloth systems the wings were completely new system but using similar Tech and we knew we needed subtlety to achieve believability the creature and this was the result this is the I think this is the creature soloed foreign foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]

all right pretty cool um so let's see how that all combines into the full mix and before anybody asks no we didn't do the vampire vocals and clicks procedurally

um we went old school on this it was a big job but it was the only way we thought we were going to you know really get a believable creature so we took the hit here it is full mix music everything all right [Music] laughs

ah thank you I should get the [ __ ] out of here I agree let's move on to the interactive mix um so we do we have a full runtime mix it's the same assets for the characters especially for exploration and sequenced sections of the game it's a side chain mix not HDR although we've been looking

at HDR um we do a lot of work with attenuations to help mix focus and we have a detachable listener to help the Cinematic needs of the game and we do something called 50 Center bias panning why do we do all this well we've got a lot of systems running in the game and we want a clear focused immersive cinematic mix of all of those systems so when we came to dialogue panning we had a challenge the cameras were cinematic third person so lots of camera Cuts often cutting in the middle of a dialogue line and our initial approach of full surround panning um led to really harsh jumps in the dialogue they're both attenuation and panning would switch from side to side so we had two options option one was the old school film option of uh having all dialed through the center speaker only it was safe but it was lifeless it just lacked that directionality the game players demand option two of the full kind of five one surround pan had great directionality but it led to really

harsh cuts which broke the player's immersion so what do we do we rewrote the panning behavior for character audio actually for all dialogue and Foley and we found a sweet spot between the two options allowing panning but only half of what it should have been and this was the 50 Center bias system so how did it work well with all the character sound constrained to the front to the LCR we would take the character position relative to The Listener as normal and play the sound back from a newly calculated position that had only half the side padding thus biasing center speaker without constraining exactly to it so the example shown here if a character was off screen right rather than their dialogue and Foley uh planning 100 right as well they would only pan a 50 right again if the character was 50 right pan just on the edge of the screen um it would be heard from about 25 right

pan center with Center and as you can see it's an elastic value just proportionate to the in-game position of the emitter so it's always playing the majority from the center speaker when the character emitter is on screen and we actually did this for all the characters sound including anything from sequences body falls Etc and of course dialogue so he not only removed the uncomfortable audio jumps on the camera Cuts but it improved the player engagement uh compared to the center only version and led to a smoother more immersive result so it's big ticks all around attenuations um we World eyes character sound um fully consistency consistently throughout all the games in this example here with the camera listener distant you can see the more nuanced Foley is not Audible The Clothier Coots and the gun Foley footsteps are audible over long distance to maintain that character presence and believability that kind of connection with the world and dialogue

of course is audible everywhere never quiet because it's so important to the narrative moving The Listener closer you can now uh sorry the more nuanced subtle Foley is now Audible and this increases um that kind of sense of proximity that up close and personal uh which you'd expect from uh from a film mix we can also detach The Listener listen listener as I mentioned and place it anywhere we like in the world now this gives a really cinematic feel uh for example improving on a kind of intimate situations like listening to a conversation when you're outside a window maybe a cafe or a car and we've had these examples come up and it also helps us solve occlusion issues with the new spatial audio system where cameras are placed outside spatial volumes and a quick mention of voyeurism with our standard attenuation which puts the player in a kind of uncomfortable onlooker situation such as hiding behind

a bush or maybe it's killer cam POV from behind a bush moving around in this situation here all the distant character sound is audible but the tree Russell is also audible adding to that kind of uncomfortable placement of the um of the viewer or the player and this is a great feature for horror moving on to Azimuth um this is a wise screen grab of course how do we attenuate The Sound by angle of emitter from listener it's a kind of meson-sen approach we want to attenuate sounds when they are off screen and it's a kind of subtle Focus pull for the on-screen sound so we decrease the volume a little bit of high pass and low pass nothing too clever there but it's a good result so with the character on the edge of the screen we have full volume no filters to when the character is behind the listener or the camera there's reduced volume and maximum filtering so it's a

slightly muffled less focus in the mix less Clarity and we have different settings for dialogue this is the fully setup dialog is of course dominant with less attenuated sound so with interactive mix a quick look at our side chain busing this is our basic top down priority we use a combination of side chain volume ducking side chain EQ band ducking especially prevalent with dialogue taking 1K out of other elements and we do side chain compression of course that's super smooth and the lower priority sounds can rise up in the gaps so this enables us to really focus the mix on the action we want the player or the viewer to be seeing and it keeps Clarity of course within the dense cinematic mix that we're aiming for and we do some cool stuff actually with this uh in little hope the second in the uh in season one uh we added something that placed all the diegetic sound in fog and through various plugins and

rtpcs we had analog control on how those sounds reacted to the fog and additionally for little hope we had control over the pitch of all the atmospheres 2D in 3D the reason for this is matching the kind of psychological state of the protagonist in that game and it was just a really effective way of preceding scares we could literally Bend uh reality so we have a lot of fun with that but example I want to show today is a scene called um boat fight from the Devil in Me which was the fourth dark picture came out last November it's a high action scene and the challenge in this scene is to keep the intensity of the scene and there's a lot going on we want to focus on the right action so this is our basic mix broken out a bit to leave some space for other elements so unique to the scene is the boat engine revs uh there is a boat in the scene so you

mix this thing is the boat engine revs and there's also a boat Loop which helped fill the gaps between those key sfx we had a lot of water um lots of incidental water splashes characters falling in the water Etc and we had constant water around the hull of the boats that was going along there was a lot of combat sound effects there was a lot of punch in and stabbing and kicking and all that stuff going on on the boat as well so we wanted these elements to be very strong hold a lot of weight in the mix and we've course had a dynamic breath system for all the characters so we had a lot of sub mixes going on um we submixed a dialogue against the breath system basically full ducking on a per character basis when dialer played there was another sub mix with the combat sound effects stuck in the main procedural Foley systems the water spot effects duct the more

constant water elements due to just allow them to stand out and the water spots also ducked the boat engine due to a frequency range clash in high end engine revs of course stuck the engine Loops to add intensity music and sound design had a low-pass ducking on the water and the engine Loops to clean up the mix when the water was pumping was high enough in level uh dialogue had its normal varied ducking on pretty much everything to make it audible regardless of what was going on and the explosions similar to dialogue duct everything by a relatively high amount to make them feel bigger in the mix so I hope you're all still with this and atmospheres they basically got ducked by everything um poor atmospheres but when they rose up in the mix it reminded you you were out on a lake it was windy and cold

so looking at the example from the Devil in Me Take note that in this scene all of the characters can be dead all of them can be alive there's massive branching um they're depending on the actions of the player throughout the game there's different collectibles in the game which can be used as weapons so there's a whole variety there there's a heck of a lot of camera cuts and perspective changes so all the attenuations and Azimuth and 50 Cent advice that's all at work and there are slo-mos which basically kind of trouts the soundscape which uh yeah which kind of affects the the pace of the scene so let's see how that all came together in game

no nothing [Music]

foreign so one of the unique features that we created for the devil in me as well was the directional microphone um and this was an absolute gifted sound team someone comes to me and says oh there's this listening device in fact it was Tom just sitting here came to us and said is this listening device we've

designed for this game um it's a player controlled um sorry one of the characters in the game Aaron I should fill you in actually is a sound recordist um so there's a reason for the microphone being there um it's actually key gameplay mechanics that had to work well it's a player-controlled shotgun mic in third person no brainer right um so we had to create an in-game simulation um uh we could decide whether it was cardioid hypercardioid how directional how that affected the sense of horror and claustrophobia um we simulated off-access my attenuation and we actually went for a hyper real result with the offaxis kind of uh bleeding uh or sending to the reverbs a little bit more additionally uh airing this character or the player can take Aaron's headphones on and off at will so we needed to be able to flip the mix so it was all rtpc values all at runtime and all um sort of available on an analog slider

and on top of this similar to the gun Foley we added mic handling um so it's kind of all the noises you don't want we we were able to simulate we don't want normally sorry when you're recording um so this feature reviewed really well a great quote from nme which I love and people have already saying it is like a horror ASMR which I just think is is awesome so how does it look in Wise well it's actually pretty simple for audio we had lots of control via the Azimuth system but you'll notice the curves are a little bit more extreme here um we've added aux and variants as I mentioned there was for the off axis there's a lot of a lot of increased aux send um and worth noting um we decided in the end uh to have this Azimuth based on camera Direction rather than third person character Direction because the character can turn around and walk towards you it just it seemed to fit the kind of um The Player's perspective better

so let's see how that looked and sounded in game [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] thank you [Music] [Music] he's very strong sing it and I won't be scared long foreign [Laughter]

[Applause] [Music] I'm glad you enjoyed it thank you for sharing that um so let's take a little musical include uh from all the systems um so Jason Graves composed all the music for uh season one um and it's just a massive variety um completely different scores for each game reflecting of course and driving the narrative emphasizing the location the historical era uh fitting the horror sub-genre and we have a lot of fun and experimentation with the music looking back at the four games from season one uh man and Madan was all written in three four representing the ways it's kind of like a waltz um uh it was based in the South Pacific uh full orchestral score very sort of

traditional orchestral horror little hope was a more minimal soundscape based on research of instruments from the 1692 Salem area of North America uh House Of Ashes um there were four thousand year old Sumerian kind of backdrop in Iraq um with a strident signature and the whole score progressed from being orchestral to being sort of very hybrid very synth based uh horror as we realize um spoiler that the vampires are aliens and lastly Devil in Me was harking back to 1892 Chicago we decided that Bernard Hermann kind of Nod to Hitchcock Psycho um it just really fit the right time for that for that score and in the devil in me as well we also played a lot of classical and operatic pieces underscored with ailatoric orchestral techniques

um for uh to add to some dramatic moments which we'll come to later so here's a two-minute medley showing some of the variety from season one which is just not doing any justice at all but hopefully you'll get a sense of variety all of these tracks available on Spotify so you can follow up on anything you'd like there but here's a two-minute medley from dark pictures season one [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Applause]

[Music] foreign [Music] so back to the systems uh music diegetic music rising up into full score um so we have a system which at runtime using rtpcs can bring digestive music starts in the world into full school for

added drama in the devil in me these were classical operatic pieces they would start as a mono file being played from a gramophone and rise up to stereo score we had three rtpcs we could control one controlled a mix between the mono and the stereo files that you can see here another rtpc controlled a kind of Reverb send to you know effectively a kind of really bathed Reverb so we could uh really add some Tales to the to the moments and we also had another rtpc which um controlled a distortion um if we wanted to really nasty up some of this music at crucial moments so technically it was very simple in wise but the difficulty was authoring um we were working with stereophiles so made transitions difficult for the interactive sections and you know we're working with stereo classical pieces

um but we we think we kind of got to an amazing result to make a lot of compromises along the way and there was the odd dodgy edit that made it to release but it was very difficult to kind of control those so here's another example from the WME fourth in the series from the dark pictures uh where music by Design signifies an impending murder or potential murder depending on the branches that you choose in this example the music starts diegetically outside the door uh uh we maintain some directionality throughout the scene swelling it a little bit into full score at different points for for added kind of confusion drama and then at the end as you'll see it rises to full score for a very specific reason [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] s please [Music] foreign [Music] I'm here [Music]

[Music] okay all right [Music]

[Applause] [Music] boys [Music] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] another way to go so what for the future of the dark pictures Anthology well we're already into dp5 which is the season two opener uh this one's called directive 80 20. and now we get to take horror to space different forward Protestants vessel and Cassiopeia after successfully rendezvous with a

curb this marker we have detached the booster ring and Spirits are high as we make our Final Approach to Tau City f the ship has suffered a whole impact but damage is minimal and our technicians are restoring full functionality this is Thomas Carter something's wrong with ships she's trying to kill me our next transmission we broadcast from orbit around Humanity's future home Stephanie Stephanie [Music] thanks very much for listening

does anybody have any questions humans be answering them Jason we actually never discussed this and I'm oh my God so I'm curious with all the procedural stuff all the choices in these games just for the last one the Devil in Me Do you have any idea if you took all of the different options that are available to the players and stack them in one long linear game how long that would be versus how long the average playthrough is when you're making all those individual decisions so yeah so if you so all of the so it's gameplay versus length of material because of the choices that you don't take when you're playing um off the top of my head I'm aiming like 20 30 extra material what's the number there's five five hundred percent no I don't um we don't really know

likes it closer to double they say somewhere between 40 and 50 percent it's a lot and actually makes QA really hard for testing um and new branches can appear without you knowing as well especially towards the end um yes I know there's there's a lot of extra work we put in and it keeps the replayability games um solid as well yeah absolutely I actually have a question for Jason did you write that Opera piece no no oh okay because I actually played this game and I'm really glad I got to see him die because I chose to like go under the great and he that story that he survived but that was it was pretty great Barney Barney stop it Mata but is it poker lazy I'm really bad on Opera can anyone qualify that um I'll go with that then yeah actually they did the story is the the uh Ollie who edited that piece uh he works he was working from home with his partner and apparently she cried uh when

he showed it to her and it you know so yeah we've succeeded in um emotionally engaging uh Ollie's partner yeah hi uh I have a question regarding the the death cycle they were mentioning and obviously the the importance of working with the systemic audio to actually be able to catch up with that all the other teams all the other departments and you know the Cinematic teens the animations and so on were they also working on that space of one ear or was it just for the audio team so like maybe stacking it up yeah good question I mean um each project has had its kind of delays or advances uh every time we've rolled over um House Of Ashes for example they were like five or six levels ready to go um other projects haven't been so lucky they've been maybe held up by the one before which is very logical um on the whole the kind of cinematics team but there's a heck of a lot recorded early and it starts hitting the game in

kind of a rough form and that can be quite varied there's it's really kind of key year where we're all piling in kind of give or take a couple of months basically okay good yeah cool hi there uh well that was kind of my question but I'm gonna have a second one uh again great job that was fantastic I'm actually interested I work in production so for me I'm actually very interested to see the pre-production moments when you know the next theme of a game of the same installment how do you approach it what are what do you have at the moment to get your team started and uh where you get your references and whatever you so I think yeah so I think the question is where what do you what do you do before the game's ready to kind of develop the ideas yeah um the answer is the best thing you can um sometimes you've got nothing to go on sometimes you have a film reference you know we ReSound sections of films to kind of prove to ourselves how we want to make it sound um uh or you can go to simple mood board

stuff you know YouTube playlist for music for example um sometimes you have a 10 minute section of a vertical slice which is okay and so we can take that out as a video and then just pre-vis the heck out of it or all the Departments can kind of Pile in so I think the short answer is whatever you can do I mean I've done it with like [Music] um hand-drawn images from a storyboard that I've kind of thrown into like iMovie this is a while ago and stretched them out to kind of rough timings and then you know sunk a sting to a cut between a distant and a close-up you know storyboard so it's whatever you can get your hands on and just prove it to yourself basically that you know this is what you want all right and tough question it's like choosing which show you prefer the most but which of the four game here did you have the most fun working on um um I can't say which one exactly I can say which one was the toughest it was

the first of the four because we were formulating everything yeah I mean it was yeah it was kind of like um like that you know we I think we took a lot for granted in that game because we we obviously had until dawn experience we were like yeah we know what we're doing you know and uh no actually we wanted to change things we wanted to improve things um so there was a lot of design iteration um I should say actually Tom Heaton here was the game director on both the first and the fourth so if you've got some production questions or you might want to tag him thank you yeah no problem I have a small technical question a bit a bit more about the implementation I guess uh regarding the procedural Foley system yeah how did you like get detect different kind of triggers and what the information was being sent there I guess you had sliding and contacts and like detecting materials or yeah yeah so um we've changed the system recently so I'm a little bit vague on some of it um

we uh we had before um a distance to Bone between here and um and also speed of movement so one of the kind of key features of this whole system is a bit of Special Sauce you know in there but one of the key features is emitter speed so if it's triggering um long samples or short samples it doesn't matter as soon as that emitter stops moving in sync so where the sounds end are just as crucial as where they start um yeah we have like um surface detection emitter speed chest emitter speed is something which indicates Walk and Run and also walk slow um yeah I mean this it's just uh it's just tweaking the settings on those I think I think a lot of games companies do very similar things to that we were quite Advanced a few years ago but kind of a few a few different Studios have caught up um but yeah it's just it's just tweaking the values pouring over them and we use those same values for all the characters with a body variant switch to play

different samples that are material consistent or shoe type consistent or um yeah character consistent cool thanks okay it's a bit there cool okay cool well thanks very much enjoyed it [Music]