What's the tech?

Creating an audio experience that create an additional level of perception, that's the goal. This leads to multiple topics: special effects, ambient, music, occlusion. They are some of the items addressed for the game.

Let's talk about sound!

Grounding the character: footsteps 

This simply make a difference. Feeling the ground, the type of surface the character is walking on contribute to create a perception of reality, even without any body visuals. You may think: "this feature is basic". But, hey, this is not an option. What if there is no sounds at all or the same one all over the game? Boring.

I've worked, before starting the development of this game, on a simple system that can detect physically any type of materials the character is currently touching. This make possible, in real time, the restitution of each footsteps like walking on a wooden floor, a soft carpet or even water.  

Here, an example from a scene:

Occluded sound

This is a big feature that integrate greatly the environmental sounds in 3D. The occlusion system react dynamically to what the character should ear depending on  the position of the source emitter. For example, it can detect if the sound is behind a door. If that door is opened, the sound will be clear. If the same door is closed, the sound will feel like filtered partially by it. 

An other video that demonstrate this system:

Dynamic audio 

A unique game experience deserve a unique, dynamic and adaptive sound experience. Using a single predefined sound track isn't an option to reach my expectations. I can say that, after several months of experiments and work on this game, the audio is really a major topic of work, and not an easy one.

Like the occlusion, there is a set of components used to handle the sounds depending on the player context.