From Weapons to Wizards: Transforming Aesthetic and Modularity in 'Tiny Tina's Wonderlands'

[Music] thank you good morning how's it going everyone hope everyone's having a wonderful GDC so far yeah yeah that's right so I'm happy to be here I hope uh all of you are happy to be here um not only um I happy to be here just because it's GDC it's the first GDC in a couple years um so that's cool I'm also very happy that we have a video game releasing this week it's called Uh Tiny Tina's wonderlands so that's pretty cool

before we get started I've been told to ask the crowd a few questions uh if everybody can like move to the center it looks like everybody's fine is everybody fine everybody looks good okay uh turn off your phones and any noise making devices that you might have uh remember to not record any of this because uh that's illegal uh yeah sweet all right so uh this is going to be a talk all about uh wonderlands but don't worry I'm not going to spoil anything there's mainly going to be talk about the audio systems in the game and stuff like that um and mostly we're going to cover loot is the main topic and how in audio we kind of like make the loot special in our own uh specific way um so yes shout out to everybody at gearbox I wouldn't be here you know there are so many incredible uh talented people on our team and I wouldn't be

here if it weren't for all the amazingly uh smart talented and hard-working people that pour their hearts and souls into everything we do um so yeah big shout out to them um so who am I I am Joshua Davidson I'm lead sound designer at Gearbox software I was born and raised in Macon Georgia I graduated Full Sail in 2007 with an associate's degree in recording Arts I started my career in video games back in 2007 at volition Inc I worked on Saints Row 2 and Red Faction gorilla while I was there I did a little bit of music composition on Red Faction guerrilla um not a whole lot but it was a fun experience um I started working at gearbox in 2009 exactly two years after I started my job at volition and the sound design team at that time in 2009 was just Mark Petty race and Varner and myself I spent about a month or two uh helping them finish Borderlands one um I mainly finished off some bugs and stuff like that on Borderlands one and like went straight into work on the DLCs

so Borderlands is kind of known for those the the long-winded DLCs and that was a really cool experience to just have that quick turnaround cycle of like working on a project for like a month or two and then pushing it out like we were we were working very very fast back then um so yeah between 2009 and 2010 uh this is what the audio team was it was Mark Petty as an audio director race and Varner audio leading composer Andrew Chaney and was it audio lead to and uh I was the young sound designer um we were in this old building in Plano this is the old building that we were in between 2009 to 2015. those audio offices were kind of makeshift audio offices they weren't really designed to be audio offices because it was like in a bank so we just put audio panels all around the rooms and tried to make our best with it but in 2015 we had an opportunity we had this opportunity to build a an actual game development Studio from the ground up and that was

really cool because it means we can make you know an audio facility from the ground up and actually really really think about how we want our audio facility to operate so this is like a just a little diagram that little sloppily drawn Circle that I did right there is where all the audio offices are there are six control rooms right there and we have a live room and um we also have a vo room as well um so the construction of it began in uh like 2000 like middle of 2015 or so for the audio offices and these are kind of like what what those preliminary like shots of them were looking like before we finished construction on them and as we go through you'll start to see the the shape of the offices start to come together this is one of the control rooms and now we've got the desk in there we got the um monitor mounted on the wall um uh you can see on the sides there there's the acoustic foam batting um

that goes inside the walls so if you actually touch the walls you'll feel like this kind of foam inside of it um and then we have this like other layer that of cloth that we put over the top of that and then that just kind of helps with the sound more and also makes it aesthetic so um yeah and this is when we started to get more of the equipment in and this is the final uh look of the office basically so like I said before we have six control rooms one is a Dolby Atmos room uh now it eventually evolved into that around 2019 as we were kind of finishing up Borderlands 3 we we got pretty hardcore about making sure that we are a game supported at most um the cold the control rooms themselves are powered by Yamaha nuage which runs on the Dante Network I don't know if y'all are familiar with that um but basically the Dante Network allows us to be able to have every room Network to one one from one to another so you can set up a microphone in one room and then record in any room you want really like you can record from control room one to control room six you

know and vice versa so it's a really flexible facility that we have and from 2015 to 2020 we all came to this facility to work every work day and then the pandemic happened so yeah we were all there when the pandemic changed everything and gearbox went fully remote As did a lot of game developers and as a lot of different jobs in the world became fully remote and you know things changed very quickly luckily for us we had shipped Borderlands 3 already we'd already got that out the door um so that was about six months prior um we were making good progress on the DLCs but um still this is and this was a drastic change and a lot of people had to make adjustments and and while we were also adjusting your box was looking to grow in size and and and uh despite that pandem excuse me despite the pandemic happening we did a lot of hiring and we did a lot of really interesting things between the start of the pandemic and now in fact that's what

I'm about to show you today um so um so yeah we started hiring quite a bit so this is the audio crew in 2022 in Frisco Texas um the Texas uh Frisco Texas is headquarters for gearbox right now so we have Mark Betty who's our head of audio um and now we have a sound design branch and um so the sound designers are basically the sole content creators for the sound design in our games and um so we have staff that are just completely dedicated towards that now we also now have Tech sound designers so our Tech sound design team is basically they're in charge of creating audio systems and um head like spear heading implementation they work on things like occlusion and in-game DSP systems such as you know in-world convolution Reverb they also help uh the sound designers get temporary audio hooked up to the various gameplay systems in our games um so yeah they have a pretty big task and um we also have audio code that helps us

create the tools that we all end up utilizing um we also have a vo design now uh we we have uh you know there's a lot of voice in our games and it's got to get recorded edited organized and processed and um we also have an in-house composer Joshua Caro and we have a producer Nate Randall that basically helps us keep everything organized and stay and you know on task and everything like that and we also have audio QA an audio QA lead that helps us attract on issues and bugs and he's he's very knowledgeable about all these Borderlands systems he's been on our team for over a decade too so he kind of can speak our language and so forth it's a very valuable member of the team um but that's not it we have a sister Studio we have gearbox Studio Quebec um and we have staff there and they've been working on um certain different aspects of Tiny Tina's Wonderland so like we we pretty much let them kind of operate autonomously but we we have check-ins

and we talk with them a lot to make sure that we're all on the same page um so that's 21 audio staff um and remember a few slides ago there were only four so we've come a long way since 2009 2010 um so yeah let's get to the fun stuff now so now a couple years back my colleague Brian feeser uh was going to come to this GDC and do a talk on the modular weapon system for Borderlands 3. uh it's a system that he really pushed for after we hired him in the 20 2016 and while it took a ton of effort to work within this modular system it greatly paid off uh and we were extremely proud of it and over the next few slides I'll give you a slight overview of the benefits we got out of that system so in previous games we were limited by memory and scope with how many weapons we could design and use with our weapon system like on Borderlands 2 was a lot more rudimentary on Borderlands 3 we had more

memory we had more staff and we had a bigger overall scope for the project so we decided to build a system that would allow for placing sounds on individual gun parts um um in our in-house tool it's known as the Gestalt system basically and it basically creates a module approach that could strengthen variety and Sonic character considerably um the catch though is it requires a lot of content to be made and for example uh the total asset count for all of the gunshots in Borderlands 3 ended up about 5 500 individual gun sessions gunshot sounds and for a comparison we shipped about uh five uh 250 individual gun sounds in Borderlands 2. so it was a quite quite a huge leap in scope and content creation that had to fall onto the team and um I think we did a pretty cool job um so yeah this is actually like uh this is what the Gestalt system looks like uh

just from the editor perspective as you can see there's this is a mallet excuse me this is a Hyperion shotgun and you can select all these different types of parts and make all sorts of different kind of configurations for just this one manufacturer specific weapon um and every weapon in the game is basically um uh has has a system attached to it now this is the uh the debug menu in game that we can access as developers this allows us to basically build any configuration we want like in this example I'm selecting parts for an uncommon maliwan sniper rifle uh I can make a very specific configuration if I want in this menu or I could just select like from a wide variety of parts and let the system create a bunch of random model one sniper rifles within the part selections that I've chosen basically so on the next slide I'm going to show uh examples of two Jacob's pistols and two Jacob's assault rifles they're the same gun but listen to how the two pistols sound different from one another and the two assault rifles sound different from

one another if it will work here comes the assault rifle so yeah sometimes with the system you can get very drastically different sounding configurations between the same types of guns um and sometimes they'll feel a little more subtly different depending on you know the weapon but either way we achieved something we hadn't in our games before and that was something we were very proud of if you play our games like maybe a certain one coming out this week maybe check out two of the same weapons in your inventory notice how they might sound different from one another oh oops let's get that so if you wanted a deeper dive on just the um Borderlands

3 weapon system um you can take us uh like a picture of this slide I did about a 10 minute video kind of breaking down how I made the sounds for them only one sniper rifles and also how that and how it like basically um worked within the framework of the Borderlands 3 weapon systems essentially so now we're jumping forward to today over the next few slides I'll show you how we approached uh to moving to this uh moving from the sound of Borderlands uh three to wonderlands uh into the world fantasy essentially so the Borderlands aesthetic we were used to has normally been wildly varied between the organic and the synthetic combining themes of like Western sci-fi and there's always been like a little bit of a dash of a fantasy element in Borderlands I I always say to people that Borderlands never really gets old to work on because as a sound designer the world is so very interesting and varied it doesn't feel like you're ever doing the same thing at all on a

day-to-day basis so Wonderland's actually presented us with a new aesthetic challenge to dive deep into the high fantasy aspect and really focus on cultivating a borderlandsi take on Magic systems and melee weapons there are also some noticeable design changes that influence our aesthetic choices we had a quite a few new systems being added to the game um in addition to some overhauls of the previous systems we were working with and a lot of these big design overhauls influenced the aesthetic we were aiming for so to amp up the fantasy theme we did sort of a remix of the Borderlands 3 weapon system by adding crossbow barrels and behaviors to familiar Borderlands franchises and weapons manufacturers grenades were also replaced by spells and they have some really cool behaviors and I'll cover those in a little bit more depth later because there there's a lot to those um we also deepened our melee mechanics by adding um melee weapons as a form of Luton game

so the the melee weapon system uh kind of piggybacks on the modular um gun system essentially so as Wonderland was spinning up on pre-production we were still in the midst of Borderlands 3 DLC production so at the time we were a bit short on resources to kind of get the jump start on one of the lines that we needed our associate director of sound design Brian feaser had worked with Paul Stoughton in the past and we contracted him to see or contacted him to see if he would want to do some contract work with us um Stoughton I don't know if you know Paul Stoughton but he is an industry veteran with amazing talent and a reputation for creating and releasing his own very high quality professional sound libraries under his company penguin grenade um we tasked him with the ability with the with helping us basically like create our own personal sound libraries um uh for our team to use once everyone rolled off the DLC and straight into production of lordlands we requested a

highly organic library of raw processed and design content um having this content for our designers to work with would help ensure that our designers were utilizing the same palette of material in their work so we could have we could all like have a really nice uh cohesion to our magic audio so the raw Source material mainly consisted of recordings of organic material that had been cleaned up for us to use and put into sound minor so um so in the next slide I'll play like various examples of what that raw Source material is I'm using like a a few different type Elemental types foreign

foreign so I I once we had that raw Source but we would move on and process that source so well the process Force basically takes the raw source that was recorded and adds some heavier processing to it

so this stuff uh was intended to be designed and used as a magic layer for our designers um but you know it basically allows the designers to have a lot of wiggle room to have their own forms of creative with expression with it foreign foreign

[Music] foreign and finally there's design Source we didn't do a whole lot of pre-design source because all pretty much all of this work happened before a lot of the Art and Design had had been created in the game so it's kind of like more it was kind of like more audio concept art is what I kind of think of it as uh either way it it became pretty useful stuff in the end anyway and it it really kind of got everyone inspired and thinking about like what the the real sound of Wonderland's Magic and was going to be so here's some examples of that

foreign [Music] [Music] so now that we've uh covered the aesthetic aspects of wonderlands over the next few slides we'll talk about how we expanded our modular systems from Borderlands 3. so on Tiny Tina's wonderlands we just we wanted to take that modularity a step for further um we had that we kept our existing modular system for the guns but then we also added modular functionality to other other aspects of the games most notably uh that was the spell casting and the melee weapons

uh the cool thing about Borderland the Borderlands 3 system is when it came to our new magic guns and our crossbow weapons we had a system we knew already would mostly just work um outside of the some of the new outside of that we just had some new RT PCS that we needed uh in Wise and after that it was the biggest challenge really was nailing down how we wanted the things to sound so for the cross barrel uh crossbow barrels we had a challenge we wanted them to sound Punchy and pretty satisfying to shoot kind of like any other Borderlands weapon in the game but we needed it to also have this kind of like old school kind of medieval crossbow sounding aesthetic um it took a decent amount of experimentation with the content but we figured out if we figured if we replace sounds from certain parts on the other guns from Borderlands 3 but kept some key Choice layers we could keep the familiar signature brand identity for our weapons but also make them feel you know fresh and unique um so yeah a good example would be the torg weapons we kept some of those

mechanical bombastic thumpy sounds that you would typically know a notice in a torque weapon but we added some more of that medieval ballista kind of aspect to the aesthetic of that sound so Snappy releases satisfying projectile whooshes um and here's a video medley of some of those crossbow uh weapons to kind of give you an idea of what we ended up going with thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign

[Applause] we also had magic weapons in the game so for magic West weapons we also removed a lot of those like native Borderlands 3 layers and kept some Choice layers for supplementation so for example like a doll assault rifle might keep some of those mechanical Call of Duty kind of sounding elements and and and the reload sounds so they could stay uniquely to doll to doll but we added new layers uh it's added to represent like the new magical content and we kept focused primarily on the weapons Elemental Magic Properties and crafted those transients entails around those elements and we also cut that design language just kind of familiar with those weapon manufacturers so this next slide will uh show you some of the cool magic weapons we worked on

thank you [Applause] [Applause] thank you [Music] I love those poison reloads so much uh so yeah melee weapons presented an entirely new challenge and we didn't have a system for anything like this yet so we kind of got to Dreaming up one I knew that we would want to continue our philosophy of adding audio to specific types of Parts but I wasn't exactly sure

how going into it there are basically four main types of melee weapons in the game and each of those four categories has three subtypes underneath those and and this is what those look like so this is blade type one it's a one-handed sword and those are examples of the three different types of subtypes that go underneath that uh this is blade type two it's a two-handed sword and this is a a pre-textured version of those uh subtypes I promise they look a lot better now um and then there's blade type three these are blunts um so very handed to to um two-handed weapons and those are the three subtypes for those and the last one is the one-handed ax um and the three subtypes in that family so we thought that um these could require a lot of content and we're always cautious about these kind of things because more content means more audio and more audio usually means more things get loaded into memory and wonderlands is also releasing on

last gen consoles uh so we have to be very Mindful and about that delicate a balance to the approach there we played around with a procedural whoosh and loop system first and the video in the next slide is a a very interesting prototype of that using the tone generator and wise hmm so yeah that file name is Wii Wii U dot MP4 very appropriately appropriately named uh so there were successes and some drawbacks to that loop system and I think we could have gotten there with more time and extra code support but those resources were kind of limited at

the time so we decided to instead just create a One-Shot system for the swings and on the next slide I'll show you uh an example of how that comes to all comes together basically with um a blunt weapon so yeah they were they're all broken out into different types of categories and those whooshes are very dull for the main subtype but it gets more interesting when we add things like the Shing layer or the spice layer so the the Shing layer is basically the layer that a subtype inherits and each subtype has its own unique Shing layer and each subtype also sometimes has its own I don't know why we called it this but the spice layer um we we realize that sometimes just the main whoosh and the Shing layer sounded just too literal like it's yeah it sounded like a melee weapons you know swinging but it wasn't very cinematic or interesting so we we would add another layer on top of that just to kind of make it feel bigger and more impactful

as you swung it so here's an example of all those layers combined and some of them you know soloed and then combines rather excuse me foreign so now we'll add the unique Shing layer for that subtype there and that's just the string layer soloed and this is the spice layer just soloed foreign ERS including a cryo Elemental Loop layer

so these all come together just to make this one unique specific variations um Sonic identity so we basically use utilize melee impacts in a similar way each parent category had an impact sound associated with it so if you're using a blunt weapon a blunt weapon is going to have a unique impact just for the blunt weapon you know um and we we kind of we we didn't want to add too many you know too much uh unique file names or anything to the to the system because we you know memory is a very delicate thing so we just kind of instead of making a impact sound for each type of you know um material like grass or concrete or you know glass or something like that we basically just created hard and soft um generic impact sounds and then we layered on on top of those are existing generic bucket of sounds that we use for

material impacts essentially um so yeah that's what we did for those and uh this is this next slide will show off some of the gameplay utilizing the systems mentioned previously with just the one-handed uh ax weapon essentially the skeletons are fun kill foreign so spells these are actually my favorite I like them a ton I don't really miss grenades at all and I think if you play uh wonderlands you'll probably feel the same way but the Spells are also extremely modular

but their core component can be kind of broken down into a few main high level categories um that's that would be casting projectiles and spell mods and casting is very varied this is the all the different types of casting that can occur um so without going into too much detail absent from this list are a bunch of the uniques which are like the legendaries and stuff like that but I don't want to spoil those um so there are there are different types of buildups loops and casts that can be performed for example like you may have a spell that casts a magical Elemental missile via wand or you may see a spell that casts Fireballs from the player's hands um some types of spells can instantly cast and while some can can just uh like uh be held down and then let go and then you can cast it that way uh the casting crimes can also change based on the timing of the uh it can change timing based on the player's like skill or the

Rarity of the of the spell itself um all these variables come together in the system to create a lot of variety and interesting dynamics that can change basically the moment to moment gameplay um and play Styles up quite a lot um a lot of these projectiles also that come from from these spells uh uh basically we're able to reuse the main spell magic missiles audio um because the magic missiles were basically utilizing all the different types of Elemental um sounds from from all the other aspects of the game so every now and then we would need something bespoke like um like there's a meteor spell so we would need a meteor sound for that or we or like an elemental hawk or dragon fly out so we need to put some uh some bespoke creature sounds on those and stuff um yeah and then there's the last pillar of all the Spells are basically the spell mods and that that's basically like us a small way in which a spell can

have Its Behavior changed so sometimes they would spawn additional projectiles and those projectiles could share the same audio uh but more often you would like get new projectiles like a whole new giant meter meteor falling from the sky or a gravity well or like which is kind of like a singularity um so the next the next slide will show off a lot of those uh spells that we have in the game foreign [Music] foreign

we had a meteor one's my favorite for sure um but yeah so some final some final thoughts here so as you can see we've done a lot to expand uh the modularity in the Borderlands Universe in wonderlands and it's a game based on Loot and these modular systems add in our opinion a great deal of value to the fundamental core gameplay Loop um basically by increasing Sonic variety while also being very practical because we're simply piggybacking on you know the variable nature of the gameplay design in our games we added a lot of interesting new ideas and content of wonderlands and I'm excited to see where

things get taken in the future um and I hope you all uh pick it up at some point enjoy an amazing hard work our entire team did making all this come together so big shout out to everyone on the audio team back at gearbox they are incredible people and and they have so much Collective and extraordinary Talent uh you just heard a lot of the work that they did and I'm super proud of them and thank you all for coming foreign I guess we can do q a because we got still a little bit of time um if anybody wants to ask any questions or anything Carson really fit well um actually that we didn't do a whole uh the question was how how useful was the

audio concept or oh by the way there's a microphone over there I just realized I'm new to this um yeah uh the question was how how much did the audio concept art change and how much did it actually work out um it actually worked out pretty well the only thing that we we mainly just um we mainly just uh prototyped casting sounds because we knew that we were going to need those and really all those needed was just like a little bit of timing adjustments here and there but that that was about it but we didn't do a whole lot of that because you know it would have been a huge investment just to not know if it was going to pan out but some most of it did yeah uh there's a microphone there and a line there so if you want to ask a question yeah what's up thanks for the talk um I was wondering with the modular system I'm guessing it means that some weapons can have a ton of Voices playing every time they do their thing um did you have any constraints related to that and what are techniques you may

be used to reduce the voice impact of having this modular system yeah that's a good question um so the modular system it's not like you know we have a lot of parts to choose from to put sounds on but we didn't use all the parts you know um we like for example on Borderlands 3 uh each gun each gun type has three different types of barrels and each Barrel has three uh subtypes called Barrel mods kind of just kind of like how the melee Whip or the melee weapons had three subtypes so we would basically kind of piggyback on that and we would also put sounds on like the muzzle uh and like the grip and a few other parts so generally uh at one time what's what's usually happening is like you're hearing about five to six uh different sounds playing on top of each other at the same time but it rarely goes more than that unless there's some specific like Edge case which there probably is because there's so many different types of guns so but

um we test it all the time and so we usually don't find too many crazy edge cases like that but yeah it can happen for sure that's a good question thanks hello my name's Owen um I would like to kind of like you can go more into like the modular philosophy and more about that like because I understand I mean what sound designing you want to you know add more alerts that you're doing to kind of create more distinction between different sounds but what is that modular philosophy we're talking about about that um just like the sound design Philosophy for them like like what sound do we put on what part like yeah that kind of thing so yeah like uh typically like um for you know it each sound designer kind of approaches it a little bit differently um but like um a lot of us put like for example on the muzzle that's where we kind of choose what tail sound plays yeah and like for the grip like we'll have a different type of transient crack for that and so we'll give each one of those

parts like its own family of sounds and we kind of uh you know we approach it differently for every type of weapon I did a lot of the work on the maliwan sniper rifles for example and I would just kind of find families of sounds that felt good for certain parts and kind of go from there and you know like when I first started working on this modular system uh it was Brian feaser who kind of spearheaded the whole development of it and I gotta admit I started working on the maliwan SMGs and they just sounded like trash for like an entire month and it really took me taking a break from the maliwan's SMGs and then I started working on the malawan sniper rifles and I just kind of had that fresh perspective you know and like I would I would make like some pretty cool like synth punch layers and stuff like that like laser pews you know and stuff and I would put them on I would give a certain part A family of pews and then some some parts would get more of a body like a bottom low end layer and stuff like that so with the philosophies more like it's exploring the feeling of the sound and allow

yourself the time to kind of like create that some like similar families and sounds that we're probably married again yeah yeah totally okay cool thank you so much yeah yeah absolutely I I was just curious about the procedural exploration that you did with like the wise tone generator and what eventually LED you to abandon using that on this project and whether you think it's feasible that you might use it for this purpose on future projects yeah that's a good question um so the the looping system it was mainly uh we just didn't have like the the we didn't at the time our our code staff were um kind of ramping up on kind of some other engine side work stuff so we didn't really have um the code support that we needed to get that done at that time so that was kind of why we ended up abandoning abandoning it um we we were like I'm not exactly sure we were kind of we were really in the thick of development

at that time so adding like really really brand new features was like risky so we just kind of had to and kind of that's why we kind of stuck with what we knew you know and just kind of stuck with like the One-Shot method you know and that ended up working out well but yeah and I think in the future uh something like much more you know because like what's cool about like a looping system is you can get away with like doing a very little about amount of content and get a lot of mileage out of it you know like I've seen some really cool systems from some games you know that can utilize fully that way essentially you know like just with a few Loops like you can have you know you with like one six second Loop essentially you could probably like do a whole game's worth of audio with that you know but that's that's like a whole whole another hopefully we'll we'll have like a a GDC talk on something like that in the future thank you yeah hi uh jumping back to the whole modular approach of weapons how do you make sure

that things aren't clashing in a weird way for us like you have some transients on something into some body or spice or the Tails how do you make sure that it all kind of amalgamates into a good sounding thing rather than like random stuff going yeah the the trick there is to like not put you know just be very choiceful uh in your decisions on like what parts you use uh try not to use every part for a family of guns um like I kind of mentioned before like just use barrels Barrel mods like and the same thing happen with uh the melee the melee stuff like we we really when you're swinging a melee weapon there's usually not going to be more than three or four sounds and they're all whooshes you know so they're they kind of naturally blend together and it just takes a little bit of experimentation just to make sure like they're you know you know in the frequency spectrum sense of things that they all kind of like fit their own fit in their own Quincy space essentially like that's why the shings are kind of just like a very resonant that are kind

of like a resonant Spike essentially and you know the whooshes are more dull and more low mid you know and then like the spicy layers are kind of like you know a little bit you hear a little bit more higher frequencies with those to kind of that kind of sells more of the wind the wind whooshes and the like the the passage of air going through the weapon essentially I think okay so you're kind of assigning more throughout the frequency spectrum to the different modular parts of the gun to make sure that there's no yeah and we like I I kind of showed like that debug window that we have in our game and that allows us to really really really test it thoroughly like and it also allows us to kind of really see how random things can get and so you can just like spawn a thousand you know variations of that particular type of weapon and that can enable you to just really pick them all up and play with them and see if you're gonna get any weird things but after a while we we you know at first I was when I like like I was saying with the melon SMGs on Borderlands 3 I was everything

sounded like a mess because I didn't know what I was doing with this system for a while but really I think um just having the the right amount of layers and just knowing how to design them it just takes time working with the system and like um everybody who everybody who's worked with the system all of our sound designers that have come up the new the new guys and stuff like they're extremely intimidated by the system and it you know but it and that's very understandable but once you've it really it really takes a little bit of lead time work like to really get used to working in it and like it takes a couple months sometimes just to really get a good feel for it because it's pretty complex for sure cool thank you hello well first of all I'm sorry I have a couple of questions but I'll try to keep them really quick uh so in creating of um a gun sound do you start with Naturals uh guns sometimes or you prefer to start everything synthetic in terms of taking a real gun and recording it just because it might be more natural

and maybe there are some sounds that would keep it more um as a better clue however maybe over exaggerating would be better in general so what what is your approach to creating uh this type of yeah my experience mainly working in the system for the guns specifically is like um I I mainly worked on maliwan weapons um and I'm a big synth nerd so that's kind of where I feel most comfortable you know naturally um so I kind of um on Borderlands 3 I we had a lot of pre-production time where um like my my colleague Racine Varner and I we were using serum like crazy and just constantly making patches with it and I I was making a lot of synth patches with serum and learning to design my own laser sounds like laser pews and things like that and so I started personally with the synthetic stuff but you can't just use that you know because like using just the synthesizer or raw synthesizer sound is

going to sound completely awkward in the game because that's not how a real gun would sound in real life you I always like to layer in like real weapons and kind of dirty it up with saturation and stuff to kind of pull back that really clean clean sound that a synth can have especially software synth like CRM it's very very clean so you kind of have to find you know unique ways to dirty it up a little bit and make it feel a little more so do you put sometimes the real sound into the sampler in the serum itself and then start using some of the algorithms there like the way the wave tables yeah in the left when the wave tables do use it or you just do it separately uh I have used I have used my own custom wave tables but I've done them more as like uh just an experiment I didn't do that with gun sounds though but that's a cool idea for sure okay well uh another quick uh question so about the recording processes um I assume that in the beginning when you started it was probably more difficult because you needed to in both cases you needed to have a studio and a good environment what was the regular problem with the

recording and did you have to I mean you probably have to fix some of the sounds and clean them up what were you doing with this for example if you recorded a sound but there is some background noise or some frequency speaking up that are not naturally the sound yeah so like when it came to refer to re-record it yeah we uh we actually enlisted some Outsourcing Partners to help us get like recordings of guns we also recorded guns ourselves and and and got those files cleaned up um so yeah that's pretty much what we did with that we also this is actually a pretty funny story but well and this is a very Texas story if you've ever heard of Texas story but um we we uh sent out an email to the team um asking hey who wants to record some guns and gun Foley and stuff like that and so um this was probably like in 2017 or something like that and it was just a blast to the whole company and I think we got like 50 emails back or something like that yeah I got a gun let's support it you know and so we we invited people

to our fully room and basically we created this giant like library of Foley sounds uh for the reloads and things like that just simply based on all the people at gearbox that seem to have guns uh some of them have quite a an Arsenal which is impressive but you yeah yeah I brought them to the office yeah probably shouldn't tell people that um yeah but yeah um another question uh the deadlines in a company how long and do they change through the time because you started with a smaller team and probably when the company grows the deadlines and it becomes more strict however the more there are layers in the processes the more something could go wrong how often do you deal with situations when you need to produce the sound or deliver the sound in a really short time do you prefer to be more creative or go with a more safer approach if we're using most of the sounds and just adding something to that to make it more unique um I mean that's that's different uh

depending on what it's different depending on what phase of the project you're in like if you're in pre-production you have you have time to do like we're getting more disciplined with this over time like you're saying like uh gearbox is getting bigger we have to kind of like process Orient things a little bit more so like doing pre-production now is like um we will work on design documents we'll work on prototypes we'll work on mock-ups and things like that for us for a particular type of design feature that's coming down the pipe will get it get as much of like high level stuff done very early on but we can't we have we'll have to revisit that later whenever the design actually gets implemented into the game so there's like a stagger process now but and that's always changing for sure okay and what's the most common problem you have to face with everything all right this would be the last question because you got a big line behind you buddy sorry then never mind okay you're good thank you very much yeah you're good

hi yeah I was curious about the uh you mentioned there were some new real-time parameter controls you used I was wondering if any of that uh you you would consider played a part in your modular system um I know you scrapped the procedural tone generator but I was curious if there was any procedural kind of real-time parameter control or if all that was baked in yeah like the the rdpcs that we created for these are basically like things that help change the timing of the weapon depending on the variable rate of speed that it's being swung at which can happen with the loot basically so our Tech sound designer Jesse lemons was pretty much primarily the guy that set that up but so I'm not exactly sure what the exact parameters were but they basically could change the rate of time and Pitch to kind of like affect the parameter based on how you know what the what the loot swings at what time it swings at because you know in Borderlands You Can level up your character and sometimes that'll change the way you swing things or how how you know how

you know how fast it goes and things like that so we have rtpcs that kind of like um piggyback on that basically okay yeah so that did that affect the layering because it seems like a lot of the modularity was about the layering um it did on the guns um so the guns like uh typically whenever we're working with guns sometimes like you'll want to change the volume of a layer um based on something that some parameter that you want like that's happened that you want to control so like if you have a higher rate of speed or like if you have um here's a good one like if whenever you're getting low on ammo for example we have an rtpc that kind of like starts to duck certain layers and bring more mechanical layers up so like you'll hear that and then you'll hear that you know it get accused the player in essentially to oh I'm running low on ammo so we have like a lot of little rtpcs that do those kind of small little detail kind of things great thank you so much yeah all right just a quick question about the um the raw processing stage that you

mentioned that you did with your library how much manual work was involved with that did you do much sort of editing between the different types or is it more just batch processing um so we pretty much for that whole Library setup uh Paul Stoughton he's he's the guy that was behind that he recorded a lot of that stuff himself and then also spent the time like you know doing the RX treatment on it and basically cleaning it up and we would divide all those things out into folders by Elemental type each Elemental type folder had a raw uh folder full of just random things like that like the bed sheets tearing or you know ice crackling and things like that and then they would each have that process folder as well with the more the more uh interesting like you know effects added to those to the raw source and stuff and then the design folder usually didn't have that much stuff on it because like I was saying earlier it's pretty much just it was kind of more used as a concept kind of uh phase did I did that answer your question at all I think so so the processed

um stage was that mostly just effects it wasn't sort of any sort of like actual editing together of different no uh not really uh it would it would be mostly just cool editing like I know Stoughton likes to use traveler like so for a lot of those like those whooshes that he make he would actually take the um he showed he showed me how you did it but he basically would like take the raw source and then just kind of he knew he could make really cool transients out of the raw source and sometimes yeah he would layer things just to kind of beef him up a little bit because yeah you probably heard some of those probably had a little bit more a lot more body you know than the raw Source did so he would use traveler to kind of get those really Dynamic whooshes he I know he uses actually this by the same company you know the the it's called whoosh whoosh I think it's I don't know how you say taunt is a tantrum I don't know um but yeah he would use that a lot and and so he he would take that uh raw source and then make some cool interesting things out of it that could

be useful for our other sound designers to kind of like pick through and layer and things like that yeah great thank you hey I was wondering um with a team of 21 sound designers and all making modular layers that have different purposes for different guns and you're all using the same like Source library that is custom made was there some kind of agreed upon signal chain or mixing mastering chain at the end of the process for individual layers like certain DB that you're like aiming for or was there like certain plugins where like everyone were using this compressor at the end of the chain or I don't know uh no no not at all actually we don't we don't really uh mandate that our sound designers do anything a very very we're not that process oriented um we definitely have certain like pillars and style guides that that we want them to reference but whatever tools our sound designers want to use we let them do it and we don't really have any specific like set requirements because we kind of feel like that kind

of limits the creativity a little bit too much and we also don't have we don't have that many people actually working on the modular stuff you know it's usually like a four or five people or at most you know so it's a little bit easier to kind of like see where everybody is it's not like everybody's just throwing stuff at the system it's only like a few of us pretty much doing it at one time and we're all reviewing each other's work and stuff so all right perfect that's the answer I want yeah yeah thanks hi um going off of that question um once all the audio is implemented um when you're mixing and mastering is this only in wise or are there iterative sessions where your sound designers start mixing and the Daw they do it in Wise and then there's one yeah all the content is created in the DAW and then all the in-game aspects are mixed and wise so we hook wise up live to the game and we do the mixing there and um we all we also like when it comes to the actual mix down of the game we uh we

go to the office so we actually spent a lot of December at the office mixing the game and we all sit in the room together a few of us sit in a room together and kind of participate and we're in the Dolby Atmos room at our studio essentially and um yeah uh so we all kind of like sit there we we mix it we find what levels we like it to sit at and just kind of all Vibe together and kind of come to a consensus on something yeah okay and uh is it separate for stereo mixes and Surround Sound mixes or do can is there uh like mixed on that can naturally be okay sorry could you say that again I just couldn't hear it um for people who have those surround sound uh you know speakers at home versus stereo are those two separate mixes you send out oh no oh uh no um uh we basically most of the files in our game are going to be mono but for weapons we typically do stereo and like whenever it comes to mixing in Dolby Atmos we do very very very very Choice

scenes to really highlight the Dolby Atmos experience um I can't I don't want to spoil anything but there are some in the game that we purposely mixed to make you know pretty big sounding and Dolby Atmos we work with Dolby and they you know they they kind of help us out a little bit with that but really the the game itself like most the assets in our game are either mono or stereo um and like if you have a surround sound setup at your house basically the game engine kind of gives you a lot of stuff for free because it's all 3D audio and like you know the 3D audio just kind of gets baked into what we're doing already in the game with setting attenuation of values and things like that and there's there's usually whenever we want to really really accentuate um like a the surround sound we do it very very deliberately for a very particular type of asset that we think will get noticed but it's it's a little bit less common for sure

we have about three minutes hello thank you for coming here and talking um does there does the modular system change the approach that you take when sort of Designing the more synthetic sounds and how so yeah um it it totally does because usually you know it it you know be it like whenever I was working on the modular system it just I hated it at first because I I missed just being able to just make the sound in my DAW and hope it and just make it sound good in the dawn then put it in the game and make tweaks from there but um yeah like it was it's really it was really tough you have to kind of make things that don't sound as great in the Daw when you're working in the system you have to kind of make something that sounds like a layer of something that you would make and then you would have to put it in in Wise and then put it in the engine and then you would have to test it against all the other layers that you're doing

um so the approach basically you start to make things a lot more piecemeal that way so you'll make like a transient layer or you'll make up you'll make mechanical layers or like you'll have layers that are like with the model A1 sniper rifles that are just more synthetic or a layer that might be more uh meant to be more like your low end thump or something like that and then it takes a lot of experimentation but yeah it's it's extremely rewarding when you get it working right finally but yeah it it it every sound designer kind of approaches it in their own unique way for sure thank you so I I think you may have actually answered this question already when you said that all the content was created in a dot but I was wondering if if any of the synthesis like the like the shock synth source and the the sweetener layer for the crits came from unreal's built-in synthesis rather than from a plug-in uh no we have not been using uh unreal uh built-in synthesis synthesis at all hopefully yeah um but yeah pretty much a lot of the

stuff that we do is either if it's if it's uh if it's like a tool that we use that's playing live in the background it's usually like um like convolutionary verb is a big example of that like we use that we we have a whole I can do a whole another talk on Triton which is our you know our occlusion and reverb system in the game and we have you know we have like compressors and limiters and things like that that run in the background via wise but uh and these games we have we've a lot of the synthesis that you're hearing is was created in a Daw printed and then made into a WAV file essentially oh perfect thank you thank you hey thank you all so much for coming it is week 11 49. we did it we did it foreign we're having uh if you'll have additional questions we're having a lunchtime surgeries thing and I forgot what room it's in it's a few rooms down yeah was it 3014 yeah 3014 it's gonna be myself some

other sound designers uh or sound people in the industry uh we're gonna be chilling at tables you know having one-on-one conversations with people so if y'all want to come to that that's uh just right down there the 3014. [Music] thank you