'Unpacking': The Fun Behind the Foley

[Music] hey everybody how you doing thank you uh welcome to my talk uh my name is jeff van dijk and uh i hope you're ready for some uh exciting foley fun um in putting this talk together i realized it's probably more of a post-mortem and uh and a pipeline talk for that matter uh and um and ultimately how the audio and unpacking came to be i'm going to start on the story of our process but then also get deeper into the technical workflow i think most experienced people here who are audio people will know the stuff i'm showing already it might be a bit redundant

but i think maybe there might be a few things we did differently that or incorrectly for that matter and we can both kind of learn from it going forward an interesting thing is that i discovered as throughout this whole project as i the reoccurring theme is under underestimation on my part uh i underestimated how big this project was going to be from the get-go and i've also underestimated the the response to it as well um so uh welcome um so who's jeff and why are we listening to him and why am i talking about myself in the third person i don't know uh the i am my name is jeff van dyke i'm a composer a sound designer and audio director uh i got started in 1992 at electronic arts canada in vancouver i worked on games like skipjin uh the very first fifa the the first need for speed a lot of firsts there back in the 90s

and then in 97 i moved to australia and started working with the creative assembly in the uk it's a weird connection there but it happened and uh working for creative assembly i worked for them for about 10 years on different total war games starting with shogun rome total war medieval um after all that time on total war uh the last thing i did with those guys was this game called alien isolation uh which was uh probably the biggest aaa title that i worked on um and at that point i uh stopped working on aaa titles and um switched to working with indies and haven't looked back since and i quite like working with indies actually aaa is typically very corporate and i find working with indies much more personal and getting to know people a lot closer um also a bit more multi-faceted in what you have to do not just audio some of

the biz dev stuff and what have you um okay so what's in what's unpacking um they say a picture is worth a thousand words so a trailer must be at least 1500 and this is quiet this should have sound there we go unpacking is a zen game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home it's part puzzle part decoration you create a satisfying living space while learning learning clues about the life you're unpacking there's over eight house moves uh no sorry over eight house moves you gain a sense of intimacy with a character you never see and a story you're never told it's pretty deep [Music]

[Applause] [Music]

there we go um oh thank you thank you so how did unpacking come aboot um unpacking was inspired by two team members uh two members of our team falling in love and moving in together literally the game came to them while unpacking tim's stuff into wren's house uh i they would normally be here here with the rest of our team but i think they're a little worse for wear after last night's award ceremony so we'll catch up with them later but the rest of our team is sitting here right in the front um sanatan and angus here from which meme and um yeah so that's how the game came about then what's this talk boot then and i promise i won't do that joke anymore um

soon after on packing's launch there was a tweet that went viral in november 2021 that stated oh and this is from francesco del pia he says excuse me what and posted this video [Music] [Music] [Music] it's possibly one of the most riveting pieces of cinema shown at gdc

[Music] i have no idea what that is thank you don't know what that sound was anyways um that video had over a million views and then um then came the responses to that tweet um max from uh from audio kinetic who make wise said fourteen thousand foley audio files right dear god and i'm like yup we had reaper render the audio files into a deep folder structure that represented the containers in hierarchy and wise then used a single template container to map all the sounds to the correct surface switches i felt giddy every time we did this process it was magical why am i talking like that anyway so uh polygon did a an article on it they were impressed with a number of sounds and my friend john passfield tweeted there should be a gdc talk in

just managing the spreadsheet required for this game and i'm like hey so so here we are all right um my first approach to the audio i had a brief uh discussion with ren and tim about audio styles we had a little bit of back and forth and kind of came up with a high-level audio concept um the pixel art we felt should have chip tunes that felt like a good match except that we would add acoustic instruments like guitars and stuff like that and ultimately made different instruments represent different characters in the game so the music kind of progresses as you play the game and the instrument chase instrumentation changes during the as the game progresses so the chiptunes thing was felt like a good idea uh but then i thought well should we also have chip sound effects you know

little beeps and boops and uh ultimately we didn't decide to do that but for the sake of this talk i put a little example of what that would have been like in francesco's video now i spent five minutes putting this demo together this bit so it's a bit underwhelming and i possibly could have gone crazy with synthesis and made really interesting synthetic impact sounds but i just chose not to do that because i thought it would have been well actually i just didn't feel like doing it i'll be honest so it didn't go that way uh then i thought of this idea well because the pixel art sort of has this impressionistic vibe to it in that there's a certain amount of missing detail out of the visual because it's pixel art and that's the charm of pixel artists is what they choose to show and what they choose not to and i wanted to

i decided that i thought it'd be really cool if while that was didn't have full detail what if the audio had like a tons of detail like it's hyper realistic and so i thought that was a good idea at this point early on in the in the project we didn't know how many items needed to be recorded and i we also didn't really know the scope of the game so i just you know thought all right give me a list of things and i'll start recording it so this is a photo from my kitchen me uh recording uh the box opening and closing sound and um for the audio people out there that's a rode nt2a microphone and a tascam d40 recording unit both of which we didn't end up using for the final game uh because that mic is a vocal mic and uh recorded too much ambience um and that recording unit uh has a bit of a noisy input i found so and when you're recording really quiet stuff you need really high quality inputs on your on your

audio equipment um side note uh after taking or doing this recording session two days later i wrote the theme song to unpacking and it was one of those compositions that just sort of came out of nowhere it just went and it was done in two hours and you know if you're into writing music you know that doesn't happen very often i was very really lucky and that that ended up being the uh the theme song which i thought was quite interesting um so anyways we did this recording and tim and ren made the prototype and we put it all together and so this is the prototype from 2018 of unpacking [Music] so

it's quite similar i don't know if you can hear it there but there's a really nice ambience in the recordings of those uh of those sounds um i just did it sorry i just did a little cheat there that unpacks everything instantly which is not in the final game by the way but you'll notice here all these things sound the same and i'm immediately broken out of the the game uh out of the immersion and and so it was putting this together we learned as we went uh oh uh we're gonna need a lot of detail in this we need the sound of things stacking on each other we need you know small plates large plates and uh yeah so the other thing we realized is there's not a lot going on in the soundscape here right so there's a lot of room for us to focus on all this foley and the detail in it

which was a big advantage for us because if you think about it like a first person shooter game or something like that um there's so much chaos going on you never get to really appreciate that typically in those games there's a lot of detail in like the footsteps going across different surfaces and different speeds and movement types it's i wouldn't be surprised if this 14 000 number is a typical number in a in a triple a title with you know tons of stuff going on um but in our game because there's so much space there's we all have this there's so much time for us to sit there and appreciate the quality of the sounds so at this point i thought this was going to be an easy project i'll bang this out in a couple months by myself i assume you know underestimation right um so the results of that prototype these are the these were my takeaways the natural kitchen ambience sounded awesome um shared item sounds uh didn't sound so good so neat i'm

going to need to record more i figured i'd record a few new variants and jobs done awesome but then we got some information from the designers and they said oh actually we're going to have multiple rooms and items can move in between them and i'm like uh so does anybody see what the problem with this is um i had recorded all the sounds in the kitchen there's all this ambience on these sounds imagine you take that same sound play it when you move into the bedroom the bedrooms are typically really dead there's no reverb and now you're hearing this ambient sound in a dead uh bedroom so it would have sounded uh crap so um that was a bit of an issue it means i'm gonna have to re-record all this stuff again uh so that's a bit of an issue and uh basically the scope of the game had been clarified in terms of just the size of it and so this was going to be

interesting i what i did is i did some math there was going to be around 500 items in the game 15 surfaces 10 variants and by variance i mean like just when i was recording stuff i was picking things up and down 10 times so there'd be a lot of variation when you hear the same thing over and over this adds up to 75 000 audio files and i was like what how am i going to deal with this i don't know how i'm going to deal with this just like doc here and so i left the building um yeah my second approach to the audio i know i'll get my daughter ella to help me and she was going to uni at the time learning music production uh but she was on a break and i said hey ella could you record some stuff for me so this is her in our spare bedroom recording uh this stuff in our dead room now um and uh i have a quick example here i really apologize for the quality of this

video i i actually think i was i thought i was um taking photos but i was accidentally taking video but but you can see what's going on exciting stuff as you can see there though the items we recorded were very literally the things that were in the game you know we weren't doing that that classic foley artist thing of you know using one thing to mimic another we we did record as much as possible the actual thing that was in there um maybe where we improvised was what we were using for the surfaces um but that is like a bench top and we had a shelf and we had i think we used a cookie tray for uh the sound of putting stuff on the stove and stuff like that so um but then so ella was busy working on that stuff but then she got busy

graduating and you know how can i argue about that about that this sort of proud dad moment here so uh she graduated with honors and she um actually is just releasing her first video game soundtrack for a game called fort's high seas that gets launched tomorrow actually so i couldn't be prouder and she did a she's just it's really awesome thank you go ella that's really cool thank you um yeah i think she's gonna do amazing things so now i'm in a situation where uh i started thinking what am i gonna do next so i'm just thinking i'm thinking while looking at a wooden seagull and thinking while staring into your souls and i came to the conclusion that i think a lot of people in my situation would have came in the conclusion that i would have come to was help i need my wife now i'm choosing this picture for this slide

because uh she came up with the idea of when you put the duck down on the ground at quacks so she uh i thought that was such a great idea so our third approach to the audio um this is my wife angela um she's awesome talented super smart uh and beautiful too in every way and i met her at ea in the 90s and she has worked on a lot of different games herself as a dialogue and foley producer very convenient and she worked on early ea sports titles triple play nba she sang some vocals on a bunch of songs of mine she co-wrote some of the songs too on uh need for speed and the total war series and then she on submerged there uh she helped me with the foley uh implementation in

unreal and stuff so um and she kind of is unreal so that's awesome uh so we discussed this and uh came up with some assumptions about our process uh these are very common manually naming files is time consuming mind melting and sucks uh editing can be slow and tedious we try we thought we would try and automate things as much as possible we weren't sure what we were going to need audio file wise in terms of the end result like if it needed to be loud quiet mono stereo sample rates so we wanted to keep everything non-destructive so we could keep changing our mind the only thing we kept destructive was the initial pass of noise reduction because noise sucks um and we wanted to make the process easy to repeat with different audio settings so we could iterate quickly and so this is a little excerpt from angie's blog of her doing the process hey everyone

this is angela van dijk and here i am in our sort of little makeshift uh foley studio i am working on a beautiful game called unpacking and it's being made by our fabulous team at which bean and um i've spent a lot of time in the this foley uh recording situation because in unpacking you unpack lots and lots of things and you move them around from place to place and it sounds just like it would in real life and that's because i have recorded every item on every surface that you can put it down on in the game so i'm going to bring you along i'm just going to press record and we're recording um a little postcard now on tile so this is cardboard light on tail

and that's how i do it there's a little bit more involved i'd have to you know do a bit of technical stuff and set levels and all that and perform it usually it takes two hands to perform because you have to put it down and pick it up just so or it sounds terrible um there you go for those of you who love all those little sounds of all the things in unpacking that's how i do it go range so from there we would go into editing and yes i'm going to show you video of me actually editing because it's exciting so we would here's a take with multiple items in one take and ceramic light on benchtop we would prefix each take with what it is

cutlery medium on benchtop and this made it fairly quick because we could set up a surface on benchtop get all the items and then just fly through them in one giant take on this surface now what i'm doing is uh reaper has a function called dynamic split which removes the silence in between transients of sounds so it turns one giant audio file into multiple audio files um and now all i do is need to just delete the audio i don't like it on benchtop delete the audio that i don't need and it just this process was really quick for us um it also edited edited things really tight and uh made it so you know granted we didn't make out we made a lot of audio files but this editing process was really fast

so what i'm doing now is i'm separating the pickups from the places and i'm putting them onto separate tracks and now what this means is that i have separate uh tracks and can process them separately having different volumes um add some eq or whatever but also it means that i can name them uniquely by only naming the tracks i can use these to name the files as well as the folders that we're going to render to so in this folder is called benchtop because that's the surface that it was placed on and now what i'm doing is i'm creating a region around these audio files and i'm naming the region the name of the item in this case it's ceramic light and now i'm running this action a reaper action called rename selected items with patterns v2 by xraym who was nice enough to make a tweak to this script for me to

suit our needs and you feed this this pattern uh in this case it's region parent track track so region is the item a parent track is surface and track is the action pickup or place and there it's just renamed everything super quickly [Music] exactly the way we specified and yeah this process worked really well for us you can see things are named properly there so now oh now the other thing that happens is that the regions that you create get listed on the side here and that region list becomes like bookmarks in your project so if you click on a region the cursor goes to that and it just made it really really quick to manage um so then we're gonna now we're gonna render it and this this shows you how big the actual this is the the master foley project file for unpacking and as you can see as i zoom out here it just gets

absolutely ridiculous um to the point where it's like what were we thinking um so as you can see there's the region list on the right side of everything the on the left uh is the tracks the reason why we did it this way is because i can quickly jump from one sound to another and quickly compare uh quite uh easily one sound to another um and now what i'm doing is i'm showing uh how we had to stagger the sounds across the surfaces from left to right because otherwise they would all play at once so and that's what caused the project to just get spread over such a huge amount of time okay so what i'm doing here now is i'm re-now i'm taking everything in the whole project and renaming it in one step and that just what i just showed you there that just renamed like i think it says 13 000 some odd files that it's just renamed which is just lovely

um and yeah that was awesome that that happened so now um now what we're doing here is i'm going to render show you the rendering process and we use this same information but to build a folder structure because you can do that in reaper and i'm using those same parameters to when it renders it's going to put everything into a separate folder based on item surface action and then the the final place uh the final final name and uh and the reason for this is that structure matches how we have it uh things set up and wise wise is set up to expect that structure and and i'm gonna show you this process uh so the reason why we're putting into all these separate folders is to match the wise container structure

so now the rendered files this is the result of that rendering we did and there's all the folders of all the different items and there's a whole whack of them and within each of these folders is all of the various surfaces for that uh for that item in this case it's the box grater and then it's the bench top surface and these are the pickups the other thing about these sounds is not only were they the sound of things being moved around but they were also like a ui sound for the player and we exaggerated the pickup sounds i mean it's a little bit unnatural to always grab and slide something but we needed that feedback that you picked

up something and you'll notice the edits are super tight like there's no time wasted in these sounds but you got to remember in unpacking the the pickup animation is one frame it goes from unpicked up to picked up and so having a sound that had a really nice slow sound just felt laggy and slow and and it wasn't a good feeling so we kept everything really tight so it was responsive and tactile so going through this process we were learning stuff as we went a lot of items sounded similar so we started recording generic materials to share amongst things amongst items so that's like rather than recording a toothbrush we would record something we would call plastic light and so anything that was light and made out of plastic would use plastic light and we had glass and we had ceramic and etc the this is always interesting um but when two materials hit each other

uh the softest material wins what were the predominant sound so an example of this is um you have a metal cup and a wooden cup and a hard table you put the metal cup on you'll hear the metallic sound put the wooden cup on the wooden thing you'll hear a wooden sound if you take those two objects and put them on a bed and put put each one on a bed they will sound identical so that means i don't need to record those two things on bed i just need a generic thing called object light on bed so that worked on anything that was soft and it was that revelation that was also another huge time saver that and the sort of shared materials items that had a lot of character we would deem as a hero item and actually record that on all the different surfaces because they were special like a ukulele or something like that we recorded a library's sweeteners so for example

we have this cup sound but we also have this other cup that's got pencils in it and they shake around when you move it so we just recorded the sweetener of pencils shaking around and played that while using the shared cup sound so we had this library of sweeteners that didn't need to be recorded on different surfaces because it's more about the sound of the objects interacting with each other and so the sweeteners actually gave us more mileage with all of our our generic sounds and also we realize that shaking things is fun um and so we made a dynamic shake system which was uh akin to um you know composers have percussion libraries and drums and stuff but and shakers with velocity switching that so if you play a note quietly it's a soft shake and you play it hard it's like a hard shake well we we set up that exact same system in wise and tim our coder

detected the movement of the mouse and the faster you did it the louder it would get and it would detect left and right and so this is what that is like okay so i've gone over i'm going slower than i did in my practice so i'm going to speed through the next bit uh importing into wise this was our process these we would set up the switches uh in this case the action switch which was pickup or place those are the two actions and we set up a surface switch of all the surfaces then i had a template that was going to

be used by all of the items this was pre-set up there's all of our surfaces and you can see that matches our folder structure that we did when we rendered and the the switches get switched set in code when the event triggers so unity's driving which one of these to choose based on that so it says play shoe heavy on surface sql shelf action equals pickup and that's uh how simply that worked so this is the actual importing process of me going to where what am i doing here yeah choosing the folders that i want to import here's all the folders we we rendered earlier this is the way it looks in in

wise you select all of these folders and set it to the template that i just showed you wise lights things up yellow that match and you can see our folder structure now is matching the container structure and so it's going to build all of these containers in this configuration and the action containers will be filled with the wav files life is a pro progress bar isn't it sign of the times okay and as you can see now wise has a whole whack of containers in it that are all set up with the correct surface set to the correct switch and everything's named the same so it's really easy to understand what goes into what and you'll notice that uh not all sounds are set up on all surfaces because

uh on those other surfaces they can use these shared uh generic objects and these that's what those are there so those are on the softer surfaces the bed the carpet i think actually box and linoleum were the other ones that were considered soft as well interestingly and that's all full of the wave files and now the spreadsheet to track this thing was massive and i'll show you just a quick thing here um this is it evolving over time uh yeah we didn't really know what was gonna happen here uh we were we were uh making it up as we go and um there wasn't you know we didn't have really a hard deadline initially so we took our time and it just evolved over

time it was trial and error and uh it it did get pretty crazy big in the end and lucky for me it was actually angela that did manage most of this and she is much better at it than i am although i get into like all the formulas and stuff like that but you can see how big this uh spreadsheet is it's just ridiculous uh and it's organized by the different rooms and the different items and and all the different surfaces the this data is ultimately what got sent to unity to trigger these sounds i'm going to show a bit more detail here i think in my video i've just gone a bit ahead of it yeah so in the in the room column that's obviously the room that this item is is um

where it spawns the item name is the actual physical item from the game and that drove everything um audio id 1 is the sound event in ys that would get triggered on on hard surfaces but we also wanted a generic one for the soft surfaces so we could we needed to basically assign each item to different ids this is also where we set up the sweeteners and yeah and then the next thing i'm going to show is the surfaces now these columns were built with this is the data that was sent to unity and these columns were built by formula which just simply appended the audio id with the surface uh bed box carpet liner we're always id2 because that was the soft surfaces and the highlighted cells

you see are overrides where we've decided no we don't want to use the thing we recorded we want to use something different because of reasons um basically uh sometimes uh the actual thing you recorded just doesn't sound right and uh and you have to use a creatively make a creative decision and and choose something from a different surface uh to replace it um and this was a really cool little uh process here um this is the this so what i'm doing here is i'm making a little change to show you how we would import this data into unity so i'm just copying this and replacing this audio id you can see the columns changing with that change now i'm switching over to unity and i'm um importing this data by downloading the csv and the and tim made it so it would actually download the csv directly from

google sheets which i thought was amazing straight into unity i click update and that change that i've done is now alive in the game and it could be updated while the game was running which was awesome um and the benefit of having something like sheets in that situation with all that data is that obviously a spreadsheet gives you filtering sorting highlighting formulas and stuff and it saves a lot of time when you're when you're managing that much data um and then uh the final piece of the puzzle was that we would audit our data and make sure that it's all correct and so this is the audio audit tool that tim made and what this is doing is just uh this particular tab is validating the data in our spreadsheet to make sure everything is set up correctly and it's telling us uh which in this case it's the mouse over is telling us which room

a a item is in and it was current also confirming whether it was correct or overridden and the unused ones are ones that are not necessary for the game if data was missing it would show up in this list luckily nothing is missing because the game is shipped and i couldn't do anything about it now and this other tab the foley scan validates the location of all the wav files and it also shows me which audio ids are mapped to which items and so there was just a lot of checks and balances that this gave us and in some ways well we had this tool this audit tool before we did the last recording so it actually helped us prepare our recording scripts that we used uh because it would say yeah you you need to record this but you don't need to record this which was really uh really handy

so now i'm going into the in summary um actually how's my time we're good okay um so we recorded a huge amount of sounds um we found some shortcuts along the way with those uh soft surfaces and generics reaper and wise workflows were flexible and they kept us sane validation and unity provided clarity in the chaos of all of this and working with my family was really fun and actually i want to take this opportunity to share something with them because they couldn't be here last night and today but it was really cool we won uh i'd like to just congratulate angela and ella for winning the uh gdca best audio award for unpacking which is really cool

so good on him it's pretty cool thing's really heavy um satisfying yeah it's interesting i've been i've worked with ange since we've been married and and we've worked together and we're still married and still like each other it's incredible actually out of curiosity does anybody here work with their family like is there any family businesses or got a few people it works well it's all good yeah it can be challenging but i think it's really nice i work with a few family devs and yeah it's really cool and also in summary uh you folks are awesome for sitting here and listening to me geek out much appreciated thank you very much [Music]

and i think this is the time where i would ask if anybody has any questions to ask about anything that needs clarification or anything [Music] hello hi yeah amazing job um i have a question one of the first things that popped into my mind when i saw this project was would this be a good use case for some kind of procedural audio physical modeling synthesis which probably isn't quite doesn't exist in the way that might work best for this but is that something you considered i did i did definitely consider that um we weren't sure uh like we as an india we didn't have a huge budget and it you know that would have been i would have liked to have maybe tried the wise there's an impact thing in there and i think i dabbled with it a little

bit but um i think it that could have worked um but uh that just didn't seem to be i don't know i felt like the budget was part of the a bit of an issue the same reason why we didn't use the convolution reverb uh in in wise in this which uh we since since unpacking a bit has done pretty well we've actually uh added the convolution reverb now because because we can afford it um but yeah it's more of a budgetary thing that we didn't go down that path um yeah cool thank you yeah i think in some ways this process matches the tone of the game that's like a lot yeah maybe matches the organic nature of it or something yeah i hear thank you thanks hello hi um uh were there any while working on this did you have any issues with like file size of the game uh as the end product no file size yeah that was really surprising um you know i think all that data crunches

into like 100 megs or 200 megs i think on the platform and i think that's because wise is compressing it also you've got to remember like you saw those edits they are really short there's no very little the longest things right it's obviously the music and stuff like that but yeah we didn't have any uh uh file size issues or even file count issues i was kind of waiting for the whole thing to explode but it seemed to keep it together so yeah no issues with that all right thanks welcome thank you so much for the talk i have a question about um while recording so many different sounds and varieties of this probably some of them like metallic and certain surfaces would produce a lot of like unpleasant frequencies and things like that did you organize it in a group with dss compressors and like eqs or you take care of the sound individually just because there's so many of them yes but groups might not be as good just because yeah you know what i don't know if you noticed i didn't really um show it that clearly but um

in the wise project of the master foley file we had a bunch of automation at the top and and we had a bunch of plugins on the master bus and we would just automate uh over you know certain items we would turn on uh something with that plug-in called i think it's called soothe i don't know if you heard of this plug-in called suits i highly recommend it if you if you work with anything that's transient it's really good at smoothing things out that are harsh and yeah so we did do that we did some limiting we did some eq a lot of um high pass filters because we're recording things that are so quiet we had that proximity effect where you're you're recording something it's this tiny little thing but you're so because you have the mic so close you get this huge amount of bottom end coming from the sound which is unnatural but if you high pass it that works so yes we did all that sort of stuff but in very large sort of chunks of it because rather than per item there was very little per item uh per sample processing

going on it was always big uh brush strokes just one quick question what's your essential like mic setup you recommend for like essential web sorry oh microphone setup oh the microphone setup yes the best uh the mic that we used for everything was a sennheiser mkh 80 40. it's a beautiful little mic i think it records up to 50 kilohertz so it's really a beautiful microphone highly recommend it and that gave us all those beautiful sounds okay thank you thank you great talks thanks um i was wondering at the end of the project a lot of things were very automated and how was your process about automation coming by did you know since the beginning you were need going to need tools and developed them or did you try to fumble doing things manually and then your training would need tools and when did you choose yeah hey actually let's invest in tools you know i um

i think i learned about this stuff um at um i think called gcap um it's a show like this but it's in australia and uh this person gwen gwen go i think her last name is um she did a little talk on her process with wise and hers was a little different than what i've done but what i discovered watching her talk is um is that wise had these automated processes this is the one i showed you is the one i chose which is like taking folders and and mapping it to containers her process is you configure all this stuff with a spreadsheet and you feed the spreadsheet into wise and the spreadsheet tells wise where all the files are and they're both valid ways to do it um and uh for whatever reason i chose the the way we did so yeah i learned to

learn this uh partially from going to another talk uh like you guys have done so yeah if i may just um of course my question was more like uh because of that talk did you know then since the start of the project that you would need to put these tools in place and i'm also thinking on the unity tools that required programming and time investment yeah i see what you mean yeah um uh the the uh yeah well obviously i knew that this functionality existed i knew right from the get-go that we were gonna need that the stuff that in unity about those tools that was that came as we went and and was developed as needed and as we got clarity you know so um yeah this is one of those things where you know uh despite you know i've been doing this a long time i mean still learning you know after all these years how to do this and this is why i love this industry actually exactly that because i'm always learning okay thanks a lot welcome

hello hi jeff um really loved everything he did with the game been following it since like 2019 so it was really cool to see you come out and see everyone loving all the amazing work you put into it um honestly my question is imagining there were a sequel or something to it um anything that you want to try for a theoretical next time around you didn't get to try this way around or things that you think that you would absolutely do differently if given the opportunity yeah um i would maybe uh from a musical standpoint maybe something a little less less linear on the music side of things um and i'm not exactly sure what that is but something to ease on the repetitiveness you know um and then from the sound effect point of view i i do like the concept of the physical modeling of impacts i think that maybe there was some some room to explore that area

um um and i think ultimately i think from a pre in the process of recording when ange and i got to the end of this and went you know what would be awesome is if all of the surfaces were set up in a room and and foley studios are like this this is why they exist the proper ones ours was not a proper one but all of the surfaces are set up each one the mic is already set up on each one and you have all your items and you hit record and you could probably just sequentially go through all the items on that surface and on this and then this and just blast your way through all of the the items and efficiently record everything in a very relatively short amount of time you know uh kind of just doing more things in in parallel whereas you know she had to uh set up the surface get all the items do all the sounds change the surface change the mic

you know what i mean so yeah that would be another way i think we could have improved on the process and and if we do did do a sequel that's definitely what we would do awesome thank you so much for all the information super cool thanks hello hi um you mentioned that when using the tascam dr-40 that the input was rather noisy yes curious if there was a field recorder or audio interface that you thought had a better preamp for the kind of quiet sounds that you were recording i'm sorry say that last part again um what field recorders or audio interfaces would you recommend for recording those clients oh i see what you mean yeah um yeah so what we ended up switching to instead of using that is i had a spare uh what was the interface called steinberg usb was it usb no it's firewire so it's kind of old firewire interface had really clean inputs and recorded up at 96 kilohertz um and that was attached to a mac laptop with reaper running on it um

and look i maybe it was maybe it's my particular tascam i don't know if they're all like that but my particular one for whatever reason was just really noisy on the input and uh um just added another step to the process of getting rid of that noise so i mean for all i know maybe it was a bad mic cable i did try a couple different things um but yeah so in the end we our main recording process was uh using that sennheiser 8040 mic into this steinberg interface and straight into reaper so that worked out quite well okay thank you thank you [Music] you