Designing Ambience
For these first two weeks my tasks were to:
Play the game
Design day and night ambient beds
After I played the game, I wrote down some of my thoughts. For me, the music chosen for the demo didn’t mesh well with the visuals. The music was downtempo and medieval, and I was yearning for a more upbeat, tropical, instrumentation — or even a surf-rock angle could be fun. I brought this up during our last meeting and we all agreed that blending in more of the tropical vibe was a good idea while still maintaining that medieval foundation.
The most interesting thing I noticed while playing our game was the inclusion of dynamically-panned footstep sounds. I had done a little research on RTS games prior (I’m a noob when it comes to the genre) and found that none of the ones I looked at had footstep sounds! I looked at Age of Empires III, Starcraft II, and Warcraft III, and I was honestly surprised. This was especially noticeable in Warcraft III, which had sections where very little background audio was playing but the characters were moving and not making any sound. Maybe there were technical limitations or maybe with so many units walking it sounded weird? But I feel like there can be a good implementation of footsteps, and I think it could work well in our game.
Some other smaller things I noticed in my reasearch:
some had a sound for selecting the location to send your troops (i.e. “planting a flag” in Age of Empires III) while others did not
none had a sound for selecting a unit, but instead had a dialogue that played of the unit speaking
selecting different buildings made different sounds
I think the most challenging aspect of the audio for this game will be the implementation. I noticed in all of the RTS games I watched play-throughs of the soundscape could get very dense very quickly and then become very sparse as soon as you panned your camera away from the fighting. Gunshots, injuries, swords, grunts, buildings being hit, etc. All of those sounds can be triggered by each unit. And with a ton of units, how can those sounds stack cohesively onto each other instead of becoming a jumbled mess. This is something that I need to dig into more, but which I think will fall into the hands of whichever programmer decides to tackle the audio for this game. But I’m willing to — and actually would like to — help!
As for the ambiences, first I did a little research on the environment our game was in: a tropical beach! I had a lot of questions:
what kinds of animals do you find at the beach?
crabs
shorebirds
tide pool creatures (star fish, urchin, sea cucumber, etc.)
fish
marine mammals (seals and dolphins)
which animals actually make sounds?
birds and marine mammals
what time of day do those animals make their sounds?
shorebirds forage whenever they can
marine mammals mostly during the day
when are waves the strongest, and when are waves the weakest?
depends on the wind, which depends on the temperature difference between land and sea
there will be no wind when the temperatures are equal, which happens twice a day in the morning and evening
how loud even is the ocean?
the ocean is louder at night!
this is because the speed of sound depends on the temperature of the medium
at night there is a temperature inversion (cooler air near the surface, warmer air in the atmosphere), this deflects the sound back down in an arc
what makes a tropical beach different than a beach in a dryer climate?
coral reefs
clear water (no plankton)
palm trees, mangroves
white sand
After all of this digging, I decided that the beach I was creating would feature shorebirds and palm trees without marine mammals. I thought sporadic dolphin calling would be distracting, and—coming from California—I associate seals with harbors, and I was imaging this beach to a be a bit more remote given I was not including any human sounds (ships/boats, kids playing, etc).
As for the surf, I decided to make two versions: a calmer one, and a more rough one. These do not exist at extremes but rather more milder ends of a spectrum. I think it would be fun to make those extremes: a storm, and still water. But I think those could be spontaneous events instead of built into the day-night cycle.
For the more rough one, I experimented with the soundscape a bit by adding more forest/land-oriented sounds, trying to see if maybe adding those could signal more of the tropical/hot-ness of the scene. These were tropical rainforest sounds as well as grasshoppers. I didn’t think it sounded very cohesive however, so I removed those for the calm version.
The calm version focuses more on the closer lapping water sound, and tends towards a brighter spectral balance. I’m pretty happy with this one. I think I still want to experiment with insects like cicadas and crickets to signal day vs night.
Night
louder surf
crickets?
Day
quieter surf
cicadas?
And then there will be moments of calm in the morning and evening, with the strongest waves happening at noon and midnight. I may change this though.
The complete day-night cycle will be drafted by next meeting, and I’m excited to see how it turns out!