Age of Wonders III "Creating Magical Sounds" Developer Journal
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So how do you go about making these different sound effects?
At the most basic level the process of making sounds is to ensure that they meet gameplay requirements and player expectations for that sound: everyone has a good idea what a windy hill top or a soldier marching in armour should sound like. And audio provides important cues and feedback about what's going on gameplay wise and the actions that the player is undertaking.
At a deeper level we aim to make sure the sounds are unique, interesting and where possible filled with character. A lot this is down to the individual sound designer's creative skills and processes, as well as their experience. Practically this means using a variety of sources including sound effects libraries these are massive collections of sounds that different sound recordists have made over the years.
Good sound designers won't simply take these sounds as they stand from the library though, especially as a lot of the sounds get reused by a huge amount of films and games so we mix different components together and where possible use your own recordings. If we work hard enough we end up creating something that sounds unique and filled with character, and hopefully some of our own creative flare and personality in there too.
When designing the more abstract type sounds this usually involves using synthesizers (both hardware and software) as well as using sounds completely out of context. It's important to know how to use your tools well and stay focused. This is particularly important on AoW3 as the audio direction can be very specific and there needs to be the right balance of reality and fantasy, if you go too crazy with the more synthetic qualities it will start to sound at odds with the rest of the game world. It's almost like the audio has to have organically grown and emerged from the world we're playing in. There is also a strong heritage from the previous 2 AOW titles that we must be mindful of, with various original AOW legacy sounds making their way into some of the audio source components, just so that we can try to retain some elements of the original titles, but while also trying to give everything a new audio twist.
Age of Wonders III needed to introduce new sounds, while staying true to its legacy games. Age of Wonders III needed to introduce new sounds, while staying true to its legacy games. As the world is filled with creatures and humanoids, emotes play a big part of the soundscape. When recording the humanoid emotes it was important to make sure they're full of character and well directed even though they are quite short incidental sounds compared to more scripted voice work. Humans are fairly straightforward, you need a pain reaction, you just imagine being smacked in the stomach with a big axe or a sword, and pretend to have the wind (and your guts) knocked out of you!
For the other races you do the same kind of thing but get into character more. For Orcs we imagined what it would be like to have a large wide jaw, with big fangs and the kind of guttural sounds they would make, Goblins are small, impish more mischievous and maybe a bit crazy. So they're much more high pitched and chatter-like. The draconians being a lizard like race are much growlier and hiss like. The artists performing the emotes really need to have conviction in their performance and really '˜let go' if the emotes are to sound convincing
Another big part of creating unique and interesting sounds is to always remain acutely aware of the big impact that volume levels and timing, of the individual sound elements, will have on the overall sound, and being prepared to change and play with these to try and uncover more interesting and unique combinations of sound. Also, you must be able to throw the whole sound away and start again when it isn't working, even after maybe spending hours on getting to that point. It can be hard to do, but that is what is required sometimes.
But of course, the most important element of all in this is being able to effectively hone in on what the development team requires for the sound, as they will have been building this world / character / product for far longer than you and they will usually have very clear ideas on how they think it should sound, they should always be the first port of call to get your sound design work started.
