Left for Dead!!

[mazz]

I went to a Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G) event tonight at Pyramind studio in San Francisco. There were four audio designers (one of whom was also the composer) from Valve Software in Seattle on a panel discussing how they designed the sound and music for the game "Left For Dead 2".

The interesting thing about this game is it is designed to be played by four people each on their own computers or XBox with microphones so they can communicate. The players work as a team to fend off attacks by zombies because they are survivors of the zombie apocalypse and zombies, being zombies, just want to kill them. You know how zombies are! The four survivors, of course, have a wide array of weaponry including various and sundry guns, chainsaws and frying pans (seriously, you should see how a zombies' head explodes when you hit it with a frying pan!).

As you can imagine with 4 people shooting at the same time, zombies screaming and dying and helicopters, rain, birds and so on, the sound design and mix was very complex. They spoke for well over 2 hours and could have gone on for another hour easily about all aspects of the process, from the weapon sounds to designing the ambiences, the music, hiring the musicians and the voice actors, how the software tools they use allowed the sounds to be adapted to actions such as a zombie entering the space behind you, mixing, compression, etc.

The music was very interesting. It was a mix of out of tune (in a good way) fiddle, saw, some clarinet and trumpet and accordion, banjo and ambient electronic music and some big trailer sounding drums. The composer/head sound designer wrote a lot of the music in little tiny snippets that were different lengths that were triggered by different actions in the game play. The music would loop in such a way that it would be completely different every time the game is played. Not only that, but every player has their own musical soundtrack. If you "die" you become a spectator and can tune into any other player's "world" so the soundtracks keep track of each other so when you do tune into another player, you are hearing exactly what they are hearing at that time. No wonder it took them 3 years to develop the game!!!

I met several attendees who when asked said they did "audio". In the game industry, it seems, when you say you do "audio", it means that you do sound design, music, voice acting, editing and recording as well as possibly "implementation" which means putting the sounds into the game engine. I met some independent contractors that essentially design sounds and sometimes music and then deliver these "assets" to the developers to be put into the game. At that point they are done and have no control over how the sound or music is actually used beyond what it was originally designed for.

A fascinating evening. I handed out several business cards and reconnected with some folks I met at the GDC earlier in the year. A good networking event for me as well. (Free beer afterward too!)

Cheers,

Mazz

http://www.l4d.com/home.html

http://www.pyramind.com/

http://www.audiogang.org/

[Kolstad]

Thanks for the glimpse into da game world, John. Way fun to get an insight to those strange territories of death and epocalyptic distaster

Sounds like the audio guys in the game world works very much in 'micro' sequences, very short timespans, even just single hits? Gotta watch one's licence agreements there

Gives a whole new meaning to write a 'hit'

[mojobone]

You had me at "free beer". Left For Dead is near the top of my game wishlist after I upgrade; it's not available for my obsolete gaming console, but studio upgrades come first. (Rondo dobro is next, then ART's Pro VLA, a pair of OHC's, a UA pre, etc, etc.

[elser]

Gives a whole new meaning to write a 'hit'

nyuck nyuck!

In my very first meeting with my new game development company this is the type of thing we were talking about and I was surprised to learn that it's pretty cutting edge. It seems intuitive to me that certain characters and actions would be represented by certain phrases, melodies or loops. I imagine the music would ultimately be something like a fugue or even more like Dixie Land where there are a certain number of phrases that can all work together in various ways.

It really opens the door for a whole new type of music because of the random element. Combine that with fantastic sounding FX, 5.1 sound, a decent story line and adrenaline pumping game play and you've got one incredible entertainment experience.

[mazz]

Composers already think this way so it seems like a good fit to add sound design to the bag of tricks.

[t4mh]

Composers already think this way so it seems like a good fit to add sound design to the bag of tricks.

Question. Do you think that IF you're going to do sound design, do you need the latest VSTs or the latest badass keyboard? By that I mean, while VSTs are "tweakable", seems like even the latest is already available from sound designers and a "sound designer" needs a way to design something new. I would think that a way to sample and process would be more appropriate but I might have that wrong.

Just wondering
Keith

[mojobone]

Hmmm....there's a lot more to sound design than synthesis. You could use virtually anything that makes a sound, and you'd want a wide variety of ways to process the sounds, (ranging from spring reverbs and physical chambers through digital pitch/harmony processors, to maybe a whole-hog modular synth rig) once they're converted to signals. It would also be useful to have a large collection of sound FX/ Foley/instrument samples for mangling.

Kyma produces a software 'environment' for sound design as well as the hardware to run it on. There are also lots of useful VST tools for doing some of these sorts of things in a standard DAW.

[mazz]

A sound designer may go out to the field and record sound effects such as weapons, cars, impacts, traffic, whatever the game calls for. In this game the guy responsible for the sound "environments" even recorded the frogs that live in the pond on his property. He even went so far as to say that the frogs sound different in mating season than they do other times of the year.

There was a team of at least 4 "audio" people. 4 of them showed up for the panel and each one seemed to have had a different focus for the overall sound design.

The thing about sound design is that it teaches you to listen to the world in a whole new way, because you suddenly may be forced to actually think about things that you subconsciously take for granted. And sometimes ultra-realism isn't necessarily the best way to make things seem "real" in something like a game or movie. For instance, the weapons sound designer guy talked about other games he had worked on where he did weapon sounds where the actual players of the game could tell the difference between different the sounds of different types of guns and whether they had gotten them right in the game! He then went on to say that from a distance, all guns sound pretty much the same: Pop pop pop pop. So they had to do some different recording techniques and perspectives to get the guns to sound like they would if you were shooting it.

So what tools would a sound designer need? Whatever tools are necessary to do the job. Just like in composing, knowing your tools well, what they can and cannot do, is essential to be able to do pro quality work. Ultimately the most important tools are great ears.

They did speak specifically about multi-band compression in the context of a rain storm scene where they had to do a lot of manipulation to keep it from sounding like just a big wash of white noise.

Cheers!
Mazz

[mojobone]

For a thrill, check out the extremely intense D-Day assault sequence in Saving Private Ryan in surround; it's one of the great moments in sound design history. Legend has it that some vets in the theaters actually soiled themselves when the MG42 opened up; it has a very distinctive sound, and it could (and did) cut men in half.

[t4mh]

This is exactly what I was thinking guys. My point is that sound design would probably require a different set of tools from that of a composer and if a person is going to do both professionally they would do well to consider all that. Like mazz points out, these folks probably listen to the world from a different perspective than ours and even have different objectives.

Keith