The 'TUNIC' Audio Talk

[Music] this is so sick to be up here and see all of you here thank you all for coming uh can you please silence your phones and also this talk is very full of spoilers so if you have not played tunic yet and you're like I might play tunic one day if you leave right now I will fully not be offend ended it'll be you having an untainted gameplay experience so do your thing please okay um thank you for coming my name is Kevin reamy I was audio director on tunic and I've been Outsourcing and freelance and that kind of work for like 13 14 years I've contributed to 300 some projects I'm not really sure at this point various ways uh in sound design and editing and music and voice over and kind of everything in between and I also

host Real Talk who's seen Real Talk who's been on Real Talk wow sick I should meet all of you later probably uh yeah it's a it's a bi-weekly stream we break down and review demo from up incomers and say Here's how you can increase your chances of being hired and also a bit of a deep cut who's played phenopath sketch no one else it's an audio Puzzler I made like 2012 and you can't play anymore it's in Flash but if you DM me on Twitter I can just give you all the game assets you can play at home it's a good time okay so I'm currently creative director at power up audio though we're a team of six up in Vancouver Canada and yeah well thank you power up audio thank you we do sound music and vo for games and we're in our 11th year right now we have some 150ish uh credits thus far uh like darkest dungeon into the breach super me boy forever CER the nean and the new DLCs like synchrony recently thec higher

rule Celeste subnotica blow zero ruined King recently Phantom Brigade released in February and now we're working on dark Ascension 2 with Red Hook wayfinder with Airship Syndicate Moon breaker with anal worlds entertainment and riff of the necrodancer with PR yourself games and Earth blade from the celest devs so we're real busy but we're talking about tunic today yes it's going to be a a you now it's going to be a break next speed talk I have like 300 slides so it's like an animation basically it's me just nonstop so it's going to be a lot of stuff this isn't really an essay format style talk we're just going to blast through a bunch of [ __ ] and hopefully some of it lands and you find it inspiring or interesting or helpful sound good okay sweet so there'll be some creative directions some technical implementation in sound design techniques and howtos and Hot Tips and also we'll talk about game design informing some audio decisions and a talk might get a bit wild so please enjoy okay first up we are talking about cre Direction and the first thing is we

went for a rounded kind of sound design we're talking simple and smooth Contours like not uh you know not but cool with that all right that land okay uh also tamed transient so less t and c and more du and g j is great you know and pleasing frequencies here's some white noise 32 one bring it up R we of some white noise right and here's can I play it again let's do it again can I yeah and here's pleasing White Noise yeah it's warm right okay here's a good example in Game of [Music] some some round sound design no shrill no piercing no scraping just soft everything you know next up some generalized and synthy stuff we don't want to lean on life Library Source

recordings too too much they do appear all over the game uh certainly plenty but we don't want to be focused too much corewise you know so here is the air boss coming up next it's the air It's the final boss of the game it'll be three iterations V1 was a bit too much it's a sword just too real the second one Craig Barnes was the designer on this on our team Craig went a little more stylized got kind of like thunderous and crunchy is a bit too far too aggressive and it came back in this really nice syy zinging zingy whoosh area so have a listen it's a bit subtle so check it [Music] out too crunchy now zing and one more Victory lap for CRA Barn thanks Craig okay next up we got that this this can be very video game

the soundwise we're talking non diagetic sound is great anything for the sake of the player is great things uh like physical objects don't need consistent Sonic properties nothing needs to make sense it's totally fine and there'll be plenty of this in the talk we'll get to that later on so we're going to move into some technical implementation now this is the listener who knows what the listener is it's real important it is basically the audio version of the camera it's the ear in the world the camera gives us a window into the world and the listener gives us an ear so the placement is Paramount and it dictates everything you're going to hear in the mix and everything the player is going to do as a result it's super super [ __ ] important to get it right so where's it go though what's the goal the goal is to communicate uh everything the player needs to know to them in a way that they expect and and can react to they can perceive in a in a meaningful manner so for example first person shooter where's it going to go on the head Carly says on the head okay sweet correct well done everyone Carly okay

all right so it's on the head of course the eyes are on the head the ears are on the head if they hear a door open to the right the player turns to the right and they shoot the guy right it's going to work out for them and but for a game like Celeste a platformer it's 2D if we have listener on the player character it's not going to make as much sense that fire isn't to sound like it's a hard left but the player is looking at the fire right in front of them it should sound like it's right in the middle in the middle of the Panorama yeah so instead it's more like we pull the listener back from the plane of the game play like it's going to match the player on their coach at home you know okay but what about tunic what the what do you do for an isometric game you might think listener on the camera because you're seeing the world it's right in front of you but here's an image I've sent to many clients problems that arise with this the distance from the camera or the the length of space between the camera and the target of the camera that is the center of the screen what the player is currently focused on is like a hypotenuse on a right triangle and the thing is if the ler is right in the camera stuff beneath the camera and

listener in 3D space will be nearer and therefore maybe louder and suddenly we have a disconnect between what the player's looking at and what the players's hearing it's a big problem in terms of communication so instead here's a solution for tooth and tail the last game we move the listener above the center of the screen the target of the camera and now we have absolved that problem we now have the things that are closest to the listener are the thing that that the player is looking at so for industries of Titan it's a little more complex so that you can zoom out there's like Zoom levels it snaps to zoom levels so our solution was to just scale the The Listener list position also so the camera comes out and listen comes out too easy right and going further we also employed cone attenuation so if we're really far out there may be something like down low right some ship battle or something we want to hear but if we're super close in we might not want to hear that thing way off to the right because the player is looking at this right now or maybe less of it at least so things outside that angle of the cone would be turned down as a result for a game like Hades Darren Corb put the listener on zagas and it was still 3D audio they put the

uh the sound size in fods so they're automating sound size it's a bit hard to describe in a short talk like this I mean in a long talk but in this short slide uh the gist though being that as things get farther away from zagreus they become more directional in quality it's a bit easier to understand with a game like death store though David Fen put the listener on the player character as well and automated spread in Wise so the farther it is away the less spread there is yeah so imagine there is a Sound Source on the crow our hero character if it's mono we have widespread that means coming out both speakers therefore the Phantom image is right in front of you and it sounds like it's right in front of you in the middle of the screen makes sense right it's all consistent with the player expectation if it's a stereo sound it might be the hus full spread and we have full envelopment like this big ass waterfall or something and it wants to take over the entire mix if it's in the middle we're going to hear full spread too as the Sound Source moves to the right we're going to have the whole spread moving right the Phantom image moves the spread of the waterfall moves and further yet gets less and less uh spread

and more point source likewise far away in front you may have that stereo sound moves to a point source you hear the waterfall over there rather than all around you yeah make sense so far okay lot of nods awesome okay but the thing is all of these games use 3D audio natively it's like native 3D audio in y is and fod but for tunic we have things like altitude differences we have enemies making sounds or sound sources above and below the character sometimes in other rooms we have a ton of camera play that camera can like pan around the player it can go above the player we have envelopment to consider with all these issues as well so in the end we decided no we're not going to do 3D space we're going to do do screen space instead so what this means uh in in Practical terms is every sound is playing in 2D in the game and we're driving the playback with a set of parameters to Define how it comes across to the to the player so these are the parameters we have offscreen distance screen Space X position screen space y position orthos siize and altitude Delta so offscreen distance is easy one just

simply is the Sound Source on the screen is it here at all is it here far away near doesn't matter is it there then it's zero if not how far away is it is it one away is it 40 away and then we can just make kind of classical typical looking attenuation curves that you'd see in like a 3D spatializer in fod X position and Y position very simple zero was the center Center for both positive 1 negative 1 for x and y and Beyond it could be like 40 away to the left in Exposition right -40 so with the panning with the exposition we can handle um panning so it makes sense right we have things on the left side of the screen come up left side of the speakers again we're just being consistent with player expectation and up top there keep in mind this is the edges of the screen yeah so that's gain up top what this means this is on both Y and X in some cases and if you can picture it means if you're in the middle of the screen you're a bit louder we still want to hear things at the left but if it's right in the middle it's probably a little more relevant to the the players so we'll hear it just a bit

bumped up in the mix altitude Delta is a little bit weirder it is simply the difference in vertical height between the fox character and the Sound Source in 3D space so this is the unity view we have a little scavenger above that's our height yeah and orthos size orthographic size is kind of the weirdest one but a decent analogy would be something like a telephoto lens the camera position isn't changing across these these photographs it's just the gear used right and the changing the lens changing the settings uh it it Alters the amount of world that we're seeing as a result so something like this this is orthos siiz 15 this is this green prism to the right here isn't that isn't the camera it's just like a mockup by me to show you like here's what it where it might be and here's like a window into the world yeah so something like this green prism this is 15 this might be 50 does that make sense so you're not pulling the5 back to see more of the world you're just making the the the prism bigger so this again 15 this might be 50 but the camera hasn't

moved so again we couldn't like scale listener distance with camera position and stuff right it wouldn't make any sense uh here's eight if you're curious and here's one look at his feet it's so cute okay so again everything is in 2D kind of but and without native 3D spatializer and this text here is a debug tool that Andrew schis the primary developer threw together for us and it really helped in like live update with fod to kind of keep track of what the numbers actually were for a given Sound Source so we'll see it in action with some waterfalls here it's only three point source sounds for all these waterfalls I'll be debug warping around just uh watch the numbers there so because we know as developers exactly where the player can go we can set up curves to suit to ensure things sound correct make sense okay sweet and on top of that it's not just making sure things sound correct we can make sure we can we can tell a story as well so with this is tuning fork up top altitude

Delta is now zero we're right in front of it it's all we care about is a player right come back down he comes down a bit in the mix we can go away we can fade away perhaps towards it again we can drop off entirely to the left cuz over here it doesn't matter at all but walking up in this thing we get a taste again because the camera's panning over it's all just done with the curves and if you're thinking holy [ __ ] Kevin how many curves did you make yeah a lot but we have fod effect chain presets on our side so like the spider preset for instance we set up panning and or the exposition and the offscreen distance all these curves we need for a given enemy and drop that effect chain uh preset on all the given events like hurt and attack and death and so forth and then if we think oh we want to hear the sper from a bit further off screen I can change that curve in one place and it'll proliferate across all the places we needed to change make sense super useful shout out to Matt block for telling me that because I've never used it before Dynamic music and Ambience is our next

thing here it is in action we're going to see a little cross fade behind a waterfall we'll go to piano [Music] instead and then we're going to fade out entirely as we discover a secret room I told you there were [Music] spoilers so fancy right so fun so easy here's that room in unity and here's our first basic trigger volume to talk about uh there's a portal there you can see where the where the fox spawns into the scene these guys here these uh these portals have a play music on load script or each scene sorry each scene Unity has a play music on load script you can see the event there at the top it's one of the tracks in the game and coincidentally this track in this scene is the same one as in the Overworld so nothing happens for the script but we also have the parameter data on the uh basic trigger

down below the volume trigger and in this case we say overw World layer three should be one now and two and one should be zero so we're going to fade out entirely over that uh that piano and then down here we have a gradient trigger volume instead it's kind of similar but we have an A and B on each side so we're able to float between two parameter values over the length of the volume so you can see here it says go from one to zero from A to B yeah we have these all over the game here's one in the Overworld it's like the first one most players encounter we Fade to kind of the the B side of the uh the Overworld Tunes so in this case we're fading one on each side and zero on each side right not just one fading out and next up is another main trigger type this is a room specific trigger in the Frog cave Vault the players got in here looking for a Green Key and they see oh no it's empty so we have a room system to handle a bunch of stuff in the game it handles like rooms kind of fading in and out of

view as you go through doorways it handles a bunch of stuff and it also handles uh some audio here for us so the volume the gist is the volume only works if the current room that the fox is in is active so in this case we have a door with a trigger on each side and we're able to snap according to the room being activated it's a bit better than having a gradient there where the player can like walk kind of half in the gradient and then the sound is changed halfway but the room snapped over it's just a little bit bit more elegant right so next up tuned sound effects tuning sound effects to the music let's have a look so many sounds in the game will always play in tune with the music regardless of what track is [Music] playing but how we did this in every single music event we dropped command

instruments across the board that were sending Global parameter settings in this case set music key Center to C to F or to G sharp any fans of G sharp out there yeah H Sharps okay yeah I know humans are reading this the the letters don't really matter right it's just like C C Shar d d Shar EF Etc so uh all that said we have two things to deal with mainly in game two problems to solve one is held and one is oneshot sign effects the held is the easy [Music] one the changing room music event is simply throwing parameter data over to this event for the prayer and it's like cool gotcha and it just changes over time no problem that's on the music key Center parameter timeline in this case yeah but one shots what do you do some problems

arise so if a command is sent after a sound is done we're good it's totally fine no problem but if it's sent during the sound we can get retriggering going on it' be very likely for players to encounter this yeah and some of you out there like a Kevin come on just hold value during playback it's so easy well this would break the held ones unfortunately it's a cool idea it's super useful lifesaver checkbox but uh we wanted to use only one parameter to control everything and it's going to break one of them right so our solution was this a big ass transition Hub so when the event starts these are all conditional transitions they say what keys are currently in and it sends it to the right place in this case it says go to gsh our favorite and then to the end so regardless of what plays it's going to go to the right place and then go to the end and if it if a parameter changes during that event it doesn't matter anymore because it only matters when the event started with me okay

awesome last thing some of you may have been keenly noticing that these command instruments are a bit pushed ahead of the beat division and if you like play jazz or just composers whatever you might know of like a push so you put a note that it applies to the next chord so it rings out in the right key as opposed to being in the old key so we have this [Music] happening pretty cool right all right sound design techniques this kind of blurs with a previous technical stuff but just we're just going to keep going okay so first up first is The Siege engine Foley one of the bosses in the game here it is with the boss soloed FL Studio any

fans for life I've been there since like version 2.7 or something it's the best so uh this is a fuy granulizer I've used it so much it's my favorite ever most granz have the same like similar functionality so we'll just you know Mangler or whatever you're using just to transpose this to that stuff instead this knob is the best one it's the random knob and these are a bunch of layers of different Stone Sounds here it is an action yeah so here's no random we're going to Crank It Up pull the key down and hear random grains from all over that waveform the source material is just a bunch of stone stuff right easy we have our various layers and a layer instrument at the top so we can just play a single thing and it'll play all of them [Music] together and now we're no longer in the place or

in a position of dropping a [ __ ] ton of regions onto a Protools or Reaper timeline we can just simply perform the [Applause] Foley sick right so cool and if you're curious how I filmed that not a GoPro it was a phone and a shoelace that was what I did there you go next up metal impact variations the easy way specifically this big tuning fork we saw earlier the blue region here is a single variation the top uh Bin is like the reflect sound it plays on a bunch of stuff in the game but the blue one is the metal part the big tuning part fors specifically I put two little parameters in this event and it's random EQ Notch random EQ Peak we put them at 0. five and randomize their value 100% so it goes either zero to one every time the

event plays and then we tie those two to EQ U um you know positions on this multiband EQ here it is maybe there it is what the it's not there apparently well it sounds sweet I promise you there we go Je [Music] [Music] I'd be sad if that highly edited video didn't play okay so next is the void strength effect okay so void strength is tied to various things in game in this case proximity to these strange crystals yeah there's enemy attacks and stuff also in the game too we hear the same sound

so the source here to start start things out was a main theme of The Game's uh soundtrack the title theme and it's the random knob yeah let's go and what we were going for in game hopefully was like down sampling it that was the [Music] ambition so that was the aim but unfortunate fod doesn't have native bit crushing I did find this weird free thing online it was free so it's always kind of sketchy to put in a commercial project and also there was no Xbox libraries or anything else anyway so it's kind of a moot point so back to the drawing board I considered making a bunch of just baked Loops here's different values of bitc crushed whatever but the thing about down sampling is it's really obvious when you swap across different levels you're going to get the staircasing effect for sure so that's not going to work so back to the drawing over again instead I thought perhaps a random Square wave LFO in in particular these

two knobs the base level and the volume it's like a range so we can move the knob and it'll change to suit we're talking about is randomization within a range over time so if we want to have five baked Loops let's say across the void strength as as it increases we won't have this static set of Loops where going to be staircasing so horribly we'll have this instead and now we have this expression over time as opposed to just these hard uh stairs we have access access to way more Nuance as you do in game so here's Loosely what like an action in in uh [Music] FL with me so far we're like halfway through void strength so it's going to keep going okay so but first before we go forwards the the goal of what we're doing here is to make it seem like the in-game content is being bitc crushed like it's is being down sampled we can't do it actually so we need to fake it so

to make it seem like we are we consider when you down sample anything it's the topmost frequencies that are affected first yeah so it goes like these tickle of changes top to bottom as you crank up the down sampling so the thing is with that it leaves unaffected frequency range beneath it it's kind of this like uh this wave traveling as you crank the knob up so we want to have two things in game we have the progressively low past game audio which is like the unaffected stuff underneath we're faking and the bitc crushy down sampled stuff on top of it okay here it is so here's the event fod We're looping on silence because the event's always playing various things in the game cause void strength to take place and here's the void strength void strength parameter timeline we don't hear anything at first because we don't want to have anything happen until some void strength is an effect at least so we'll get some reference audio going we have two snapshots the first is part one first second is part two we crank to 100% over the first half for part one and then for part two and part one is basically just a high shelf to make space for some for

those down sampled highs it's not much happening so far just subtle and part two is a big old low pass and keep in mind we're again we're adding bit Crush stuff on top of this that's the most it'll get low pass 100% again the goal to make it sound like the in-game audio is being distorted okay the second snapshot also band passes the in-game like the gameplay sound effects like Fox stuff and enemy stuff we still kind of wanted to hear it so we didn't want to cut off entirely like the uh the music in Ambience so now we'll get a reference sound effect going it's that hit from earlier yeah and we'll hear the kind of screaming sine Loop we put on top of the Void strength uh down [Music] [Music] below and we side chain the uh sfx against the the screen Loop

[Music] too cool all right so and for the bit crushed Loop specifically that's that nested event in that previous video yeah so as mentioned earlier we're mixing the in-game audio with the bit Crush stuff so we're High passing this all we want is the the tickles right we don't want all the main theme stuff underneath so we have this High Pass bitc Crush content with the low pass game audio and we're sweeping both it all make sense because I had to relearn that so thank you for bearing with me did it a long time ago okay next up using Game designed to inform audio decisions first up first kind of umbrella of points we're talking supporting the players narrative and what I mean by that is not necessarily like The Narrative of the game the story being told but rather what's happening for this player specifically what is

their personal experience with the game it could be there's a hallway and a door at the end well did they just run down speedrun style and like slam through it or like glitch through the wall or do they hang out for a while and like make a sandwich or talk to their wife or something we need to make sure that both experiences are covered so the uh it all comes down to the choices they're making and the experience they're having as a result so first thing here it's really easy real simple one but checkpoints and music for a long time the checkpoints didn't reset the music and it just kept feeling kind of wrong because the world pauses the whole world resets it makes sense to have the audio follow suit [Music] yeah and tunic being a game where everything is hidden or many things are hidden in plain sight and you're not really told how the game works or where to go or anything this had a bonus knock on effect of kind of implying further what the checkpoints do and how they work just through the audio alone next up we're talking first Sightings The First Time Players hit

something regardless of when here's a big reveal right here wow right we're throwing a parameter down the timeline in the music track it's not sound effects and here the same thing big reveals so this is the void touched we call it under the hood unity and this is the first hint of darkness in the game it's mostly like a light bouncy colorful thing otherwise right so the player is like oh this is the game okay I had no idea so this a big moment we wanted to make sure that the player was you know their eyes were widening at the same rate the sound was increasing so right there gas oh my God it's right there it's it's like it's possible they can go back up the up the ladder but it's unlikely right they're going to keep coming down and next up same thing for the fuse field oh my God it's the thing easy and similar situation with some

secret rooms the player could never discover this room potentially or they could Discover it immediately but regardless of when they get there we want the music for that room to start when they get there so when they arrive here this trigger volume is like hey welcome to the room music start and then if you leave and come back it's going to cross fade in from where it started started before because they already know it exists right so we're kind we're keeping track of what the player knows okay I'll write quick one here but still kind of in first sightings we talking distant sound sources and massive spaces so regardless of when the player arrives here it's probably the first time they've been in such a massive space and we want to simulate travel time through the air just push it Forward on the timeline a bit right isn't that elegant just like here we go done check it out it's a bit subtle but check it out the

thk what a big space some streamer was like wow they did like the air travel time I was like [ __ ] yeah let's go it totally hurt it okay uh next up predicting and informing player Behavior it's kind of the next category for game design informing player uh or audio decisions sorry so first thing this is something I like to call heavy discouraging M the gist here in the Quarry is you can travel down and if you don't have a certain item the void strength cranks up real quick and it's just saying hey player maybe go somewhere else first if they get that item and they equip it that negates the whole effect they can see what they're doing they don't have this thing screaming their ears and uh their health isn't going to be drained to zero it's like a pretty clear turn back now it doesn't always work most people turn back but not [Music] always Fu this with this audio holy

[ __ ] the [ __ ] it's not even tied up that was a bug we shipped when I made that whole void strength effect I went through earlier making it I I broke its connection to the volume sliders by accident and just never realized but I kind of liked it because I was like you're going down and someone's like ah I got to turn that sound down it's like no don't turn it down just go like leave so we did fix it though in the end so next up in predicting player behavior these wind chimes this puzzle here the gist here is the Chimes play in pairs and the sequence of pairs that happens it could be ascending or descending or or simultaneous consecutive same note this the sequence indic indicates a d-pad input sequence and then you do the thing and you get a prize so um the the another challenge though is that there's this waterfall here and it's real loud so while this is kind of a nice accessibility thing anyways we specifically put the ambient slider in for this puzzle because while the Chimes

are arguably an ambient effect this is like a point source thing hanging out in the ambient space right we put it on the sound effects slider and in the end we do want people to solve this stuff right keeps St playing videos it's like that was like a d by itself what what does that mean let's I wonder let me turn off ambiance okay that should be even OB designed moment right down left right [Music] up like we we want him to solve it right just set things up to allow for it that's all so finally on player Behavior Uh Sonic foreshadowing for context This concerns the moment right after the player saw this void

touched from earlier uh this is an open world game it's a bit difficult to foreshadow things with audio if the player can just sort of go anywhere it can be done here and there kind of but it's a bit easier when it's like in front of them they have to go forwards yeah so here they must go [Music] forward we just don't want them feeling great about it you know they've already been kind of unsettled from seeing that dark thing upstairs they now they got down this elevator it moves real slow we're just guaranteeing that they do hear this sound right in this case we have a mono and stereo pair the mono pair and stereo pair have or stereo effect have uh different specialization spatialization settings and like I was saying it just guarantees that we can like crank this up when they're far away and then pull it down when they're up close they have the direct sound instead I don't like that sound what are those

noises oh no the hell is that noise that's a rare spell animation he got it and not once twice that was great okay so the first uh I'll show final category here in game design informing audio is serving design pillars game design pillars the first being here uh hidden in plain sight we're doing spectrogram content so consistent with the uh the creative direction of hidden plan site we want to have things a player might not ever know about here's the shopkeeper that room sounds like nothing again it can sound like anything right that's the point of the point of the

audio Direction so this being the shopkeeper here's the ambience track if you rip it from the game just record the output and there are little glyphs in there like the ones that appear throughout the manual and stuff in this case in the shop this one means buy there is a shop elsewhere there's one shop like this it's a special version and in this case the shopkeeper is like this one's on the house have it here take this manual page it's all yours and here's that Ambience track and this one means free so we're near in the end uh last thing in design pillars this is more hidden in plain sight I'm not going to tell you what it is at first though some of you probably might know but I'll just get into it okay let's do this so this is arguably the biggest secret in the game uh last chance to leave okay so one main goal of tunic's overall design was to make it feel like the world's not for you you find chests that are already open you can't read the language there there's no clear path no dire Direction like you aren't the hero that's the idea you're just small and

lost in a Land of mysteries many of which are hidden in plain sight like I've been saying so tunic's glyph Cipher for instance you roll in here you can't really read it it's been since dubbed trunic by our players there's no expectation the player ever solve this but if they want to take the time the words are there the the Garden Path shortcuts the secret controller inputs the functionality of various items and props in the world it's all there from the beginning the player just might not yet possess the knowledge required to interact with it or understand it so tunic's audio design was aimed in that same direction early in development we imagine the game having a voice of sorts maybe like from us the devs or just from the game itself but regardless as a voice the player wasn't equipped to interpret so I designed a musical Cipher it's heard throughout the entire game and it's never acknowledged but first trunic so if you did take time to solve it you would found that it's phonetic in nature uh over the left you have no then Joy piie cheer uh here is a rundown if

you weren't to wear so A Single Character can be a single phonetic pair of consonant and vowel or it could be by itself just one part of those two things the interior defines the consonant the N part n of no and the exterior is the vowel in this case O So together we have no but there a little circle underneath you swap the constant vowel order now it's vowel constant for own with me so far sweet deciphering this might eventually lead the player to discover the secrets of the final late game glyph Tower which upon solving leads the player to do you fear the eyes of the far shore. a website this is where we finally reveal the existence of the audio language the musical Cipher kind of downloading and viewing the websites audio and spectrogram view shows a series of glyphs and importantly the audio track also features a series of music Musical arpeggios that occupy the same time space as the glyphs and correspond one

to one in meaning have a [Applause] [Music] listen [Music] this is our musical ciphers Rosetta Stone dubbed tunei by our players doesn't make things hard to communicate at all it's fine tunic this Cipher is the same as trunic in structure it's like a sister language sister Cipher so for trunic a given phon is defined by the presence or absence of Lines within

a glyph frame for tunic it's defined by the presence or absence of notes over a over two octaves of a pentatonic arpeggio for trunic we look at the internal and external components for consonant and vowel and for tunic we're looking at the lower and upper ranges of notes so I recognize we're getting into musical Theory a bit here probably won't be a big deal for a lot of you but I apologize to those who aren't as musically uh versed but here's the briefest tutorial for those might be out of the loop uh musical chord is notes all at once yeah and arpeggio they're broken out and played separately often ascending or descending that was the phone of the shoelace again I designed tunei with numbered notation in mind that is considering notes as uh like scale degrees as numbers as opposed to Absolute pitches or note letters so for a C major scale we looking at not CDE f g- a BC but instead 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and to that end

I said it's a pentatonic arpeggio so we have 1 2 3 5 6 8 9 10 12 13 15 the consonant is defined by the lower octave and the vowel by the upper octave the notes up top and one phon in tune I is one arpeggio one arpeggio can be a consonant sound a vowel sound or the or commonly the two put together for one ftic pair so for example no be 126 for the n and 91 1213 for the o i to go you're not going to hear it cool there we go all right there it is and by default the phonetic pairs like in trunic are always consonant vowel as an ascending arpeggio but we can have a little circle underneath and have it vowel consonant instead with a descending arpeggio can we please jeez okay a pentatonic scale can be built starting from any note any root note and

therefore tuneik can be written in any key Center we can even follow along with chord changes as long as the as long as all notes in a given arpeggio move together it's still [Music] decipherable all right so every constant includes a one as part of its encoding and that's because all all note numbers are derived relative to that root note so if it's not there it can get tough to know what you're looking at so for example like the 1358 of G there if we kill the one the 358 becomes like one flat three flat six or something like that you know so and then yeah notably for vows alone like o we also use the one as a placeholder we say one and then go up top right away and sometimes we even have a descending arpegio lead directly into an ascending arpeggio and in this case we might employ only a single one acting as kind of apostrophe

connecting the two phones and furthermore since we're working in terms of numbered notation the ciphers design accommodates for all kinds of expressions of [Music] tonality all right so major minor diminished mixian whatever you're writing in it's all fair game a flat five is still a five anyway uh tune ick shows up all over the game it's in UI sounds like when you start a new game or when you hit the finish line and a [Music] speedrun [Music]

[Music] it's an enemy sounds like this little probe [Music] guy or this spell being cast finding a secret directs your attention and one of my favorites this is the secret spell leading the fox to some secrets to be found and of course the door in the mountains [Music]

[Applause] [Music] I like this one a lot actually because it's kind of unique across tunic uh all the top notes are the same so as a result the the subsequent root note of each arpeggio kind of helped to inform with the chord changes would actually be it's pretty cool anyway the cipher the cipher shows up all over the soundtrack as well some three hours of Music created by Terence Lee and jinus Quan and for each track I brainstormed secret lyrics of A Sort with the primary developer Andrew these are words that were thematic or relevant in nature to each tracks uh corresponding area or purpose that kind of thing so I'd make simple MIDI files for terance based on the words we [Music] selected it's most simplest form right it's like kind of like Mor code has like a very simple Minal form you can if you know listen to Mor if you know you're listening to Morse code you can like do

anything I can do this and you know it's like dots and dashes you know so uh and Terren would then check my work there's a misspelling Kevin come on man he got pretty good this stuff and then Terren would create a track working around that midi content and here's an example of what I workshopped with Andrew versus what Terren produced it's under Earth it says in this case Andrew and I actually had some other reference material from like Zelda or something that was like let's try to make it kind of feel like this tality so I already had the tality built in and sent it andw sent it terrence's way so see if you can hear it under [Music] Earth [Music] and [Music]

and here's my favorite uh the game was called secret legend for a long time and in fact in the title of the game it says tunic with the gphs above and below that says secret Legend too and here it is in the end [Music] credits [Music] so I know what you're all thinking why why did all this [ __ ] work it's so much work uh why go to all this trouble um well apart from following suit with the secrets everywhere in plain sight kind of direction of the game uh our Dev team had a little phrase We employed throughout development and that was content for no

one we use that phrase to refer to little or large things that we we hid deeply in the game very deeply in the game for no other reason than we just liked making it and we liked knowing it was there will anyone ever find it will they find it maybe maybe not but either way it's totally fine it's okay and by the way if all this talk of musical ciphers tuned to the music as you wondering yes this is a large reason why we called the game tunic so that was a lot uh hope it was helpful and inspiring and interesting entertaining not sure hopefully but if you want to see more of tunic we're in the igf booth until tomorrow at 3 and thanks a lot

thank you also I wasn't sure if I'd have time for this uh this is a bonus video of the source material for the slor enemy's [Music] voice thank you Isa the dog yeah she just had some salmon or something and that was yeah I heard I cross the room it was like oh my God I got my H6 okay all right yeah so please fill out your evals of course everyone's saying that just please do it helps me improve it helps GDC improve it's super helpful and uh I thought this would be like right to the hour but I [ __ ] went fast that was sick so I'm available right now any questions please the mic's right

there hello hi um in the leadup to release uh Andrew schai said that his favorite sound was the lever puzzle um activating and when you were asked the same question you said that will have to be a sec ask me after release so now I'm asking you after release uh yeah we we kept that Cipher pretty close to the chest um not even like friend for the most part love our our Indie Pals around the industry um it's tough to pick one out the the existence of this thing I mean we had to I kind of skipped over this but but it it's heavily implied we did this before like any music was written it was done

so so so early so I think the sound effects wise I mean I think that the SE the fairies and their voices oh you know I I have an answer for you so there's a there's a waterfall and it's like a fairy fountain kind of room in the game and all the fairies you discover here and there with little secret inputs all end up there and there's one fairy in that room they sort of flies like to the group and they all the other ones like fly into the sky and you just find them the waterfall later so I decided without telling Andrew to just make a special case um fairy sound so they don't say like woo he they don't say hey I'm free they don't say those things they he says like this very long um uh like standup comic style routine just like roasting Andrew and I mean a bit it wasn't like it wasn't a bad thing and like going through and and making jokes with the the Lora of the game stuff and it's also pitched to the music over time it's like in fod and key with the music it's just it was way way too much work but uh yeah

just search waterfall fairy fountain tunic I'm sure you hear it online it's kind of ridiculous and totally unnecessary awesome thank you yeah cheers hi thank you for the talk cheers um I'm a freelance game audio designer and one of the things I often find really hard and difficult to do is figuring out how much work a project will be and how much is uh how much to charge for uh for my services and so I'm wondering how you and how PowerUp audio does it with a project like this where there's so much more to just like a per sound effect price there's like so much design that goes on behind this so how if you can speak to that that might be a subject for a whole another talk yeah what's the itemized invoice look like for this right yeah uh okay so I I can answer in in vague terms certainly so PowerUp Works in a variety of ways we

do hourly invoicing we just like track our hours and charge monthly we do lumpsum payments over installments like you know now and beta and like a release date or something we do Revenue share where it's more like a partnership we do um like the game releases and like get certain Milestones of profit we get a little bonus payout it's across the board but in general uh for projects where we are diving into the trench is with the core development team we definitely prefer to have like some element of Revenue share it might not be all it might be like an advanc plus like some small percentage could be a variety of things but having a more of a partnership style agreement and relationship makes this make a lot more sense um I answered that question without telling you what the contract terms were for tunic I hope that was good yeah hi thanks great talk by the way TR thank you um so I'm kind of new to audio basically I'm a lot of Graphics work and then accessibility talks got me really jazzed about like everyone needs to be able to You Know audio is a big thing

for some people um so how do you te one thing I've struggled getting into it I'm curious if you have any Advan any any ways to point me sure um I've noticed Graphics everyone wants a$1 th graphics card a$1 th000 monitor they want it to look pretty but I feel like everyone's like if it makes sound that's cool and so you could put all this effort into audio but then sometimes like how do you make sure that like like what are the best techniques and the best things to like track down where I'm like I'm going to get the most bang for my buck even if they have like a a junky audio like no one gets audio stand audio cards okay so so it seems the question is about how do you how do you ensure that your the work you're doing the mix you're you're preparing is going to going to translate across different systems yes saying yes so yeah it's a great question and it's a it's a it's a spirited debate issue I'm sure I mean I I have a decent rig at home of course yeah uh but if I send it to like my friend who's a lawyer or something they're playing on a laptop and they're just like oh cool so it's important to yeah play your game on a

laptop play on your home theater system play it like on your phone play it with your like plugged into your car speakers you can do any variety of things and it will it will help you find like a good average and may reveal things you didn't know that are problems I mean I'll I'll hear work from up-and-comers like students and such and they'll have a big S effect happens and it's like subbase crazy thing up up up top like some twinkly Chimes or something I'm like yo if you're playing on a laptop you're hearing the Chimes only you're hearing no subs so so be aware of what you're designing some lows would be good some low mids probably to help I mean it sounds like you want to communicate some power maybe put that in there also at least some and yeah that's a kind of problem that might be revealed if you play on like some [ __ ] system right oh EXC is that adequate for response um yeah yeah absolutely I didn't know if there was any other um uh documentation or anything you knew of um kind of like when like Graphics you can just pull pull down the the resolution you design multiple crush it yeah multiple textures like highend low

end I didn't know if there's anything compatible with audio or I mean you just have to test it's not something we put in the game no it's not like audio quality perfect yeah I didn't know thank you so much yours hello I'm Sabrina fidelli thank you foring my hi hi I had a question about your magic sounds in the game so I noticed besides them being rounded they had a lot of similar characteris feeling very cool these like long Reverb taals that shimmered um for someone who wants to incorporate those kinds of adjectives or War their coolness in their magic uh what kind of steps do you need to take to make sure you have that consistency uh I mean I am pulling from similar vsts is an easy start it's uh it comes I mean things like the the EQ pet is important too right if you have something that has a certain kind of um like presence or Ratio or whatever of of highs versus lows or just areas of the

frequency spectrum that's kind of important to have it in the same neighborhood at least the the long tails and stuff is yeah again to be consistent with that direction of like Smooth it out if it's just like a hard thing and stops that's a big Jagged Edge right so if it Smooths down come down for landing it's super easy as far as warmth and coolness I mean yeah you're talking lows and highs right that's kind of it's a really common thing uh coolness I mean find anything it's like in a in a in a VST instrument that's called like ice Chimes or something like that like cool Avalanche whatever it's all like super shimmery High stuff because I what we've come to associate with that kind of thing okay thank you cheers hi Kevin hey uh hey what's up um I feel like tunic is an incredible example of like what game development is where nothing makes sense until totally does um in your kind of Realm audio took such a big part in being at the Forefront of kind of going through

development when usually audio is kind of at the back end the tail end of things and so do you think working on this game kind of flipping it on its head has changed the way that you are going to look at working in future projects and how audio is going to be much more at the Forefront of design or has that always been at the Forefront of your mind uh well always will be a generous word to use but uh I think a decent way to answer that is that came before PowerUp audio I was at another third party house that was very service oriented they're like they would never do Revenue share ever be hilarious you'd be laughed out of the room and it was like get it done throw it over the wall and never look back I I'd find a problem with the game and like a bug in audio and I tell my boss and he's like ah they paid don't worry about it it was like it was terrible and Jeff and I uh formed power up and we wanted to kind of change how we operated in general we we didn't want to just be this like last ditch um last minute decision paint job on like some mobile game like Clash of whatever

anymore we wanted to be involved much early and be entrenched with developers and even if we're not doing production early on like this is a kind of a unique example obviously but even if we're not making stuff right away early on we can at least be in those meetings we can be we can be apprised of the kind of systems they're developing the the kinds of the direction the design is going in and maybe we can pipe up and be like oh for audio we could do something in like 12 months or whatever but they can build it they can accommodate for right now whereas if we're not in those meetings and 12 months pass and now we say hey can we do this cool thing in audio with the system you've done they're like oh we have to tear it all down do it over again no absolutely not so we just even just being around to have those conversations can lead to some really special and exciting possibilities awesome thank you hey there Kevin great talk as always um um so one thing I wanted to bring up I think really speaks to this particular project is this intersection between music background and sound design as a not a separate thing from music but sort

of as a partner to it because so much of the sound design for this game is musically informed and uses musical instruments and tools like the grand lier vsts and stuff like that the main question is what are some advice you can give for students or those who are primarily composers that have apprehension about breaking into sound design as a discipline and may not feel like they have the chops to do it you know oh sure I mean I think in my experience talking to students and such that apprehension is often uh coming from a place of they don't want to they want to do music only and if that's the case that's totally fine you can do music only and in fact you probably should do music only you if you don't like doing sound people are going to smell it you know they're going to be like oh this I mean I'll play games like yeah this sound was definitely done by the composer and they probably didn't want to do the sound and I'm often correct you know that said if you want to get if you do genuinely want to get into sound design I mean there's tons of things out there I mean watch real talk you know you know you can uh get some advice there there as far as I mean I I am trained musically I mean obviously

and I went to school for music composition I went to college you know I I that was thinking film scoring for a long time and eventually I was like yeah sounds pretty cool though I'm still using music all the time in my day-to-day even like a short a sword like Shing like that note of the ring out it's got to be on the fifth you know make it dominant it's gonna be better than like a trone or something it's the kind of thing that no one notices or like tweets me like props for but I mean it's it's important to the mix right so if you're looking to break into sound design like have that be a larger part of things if it's genuinely interesting to you then great you're you have a great Foundation I mean even when we're hiring a power up having a musical background is like the biggest Plus on on the consideration for it you know they got to have some kind of background of music all right thank you thanks K I think we're out of time here please EV vals yes thank you so much [Music]