Audio Arts Major Project

As mentioned previously, the game I chose was Nexuiz. First Person Shooters are my preferred video-game genre, so this experience helped me to make decisions throughout the creation of my assets. My primary aim was to create the sound effects for one playable level of the game - the level I chose is called "Diesel"- and make them sound better than the original sounds. I play-tested all levels before picking one, and chose Diesel because it had the best selection of weapons and also had jumppads, moving platforms and teleporters. There were no ambient sounds in this level, but they tended to overload the sound in other levels anyway.

I mostly used Audacity for sound manipulation, and ProTools for the recordings. I recorded myself for the "Triple Kill" and associated sounds, taking some creative licence from the Halo series' multiplayer voiceover. I originally wanted to record a female for the time-related voiceovers (1 minute remaining), however a heavy workload combined with unsuitably-voiced-females resulted in no recording of such kind. My asset creation was quite long-winded, as most of the sounds that I created sounded different when played in-game; it sounds like there are strange EQs in the sound engine. Accommodating to this, I would create a batch of assets, drop them into the sounds folder and test them out, often having to pitch them down or lowpass the high end to shave off annoying high pitches. My favourite sound would have to be the grenade launcher- the PVC pipe I used worked exactly how I had hoped, and the grenade bounces are much, much less annoying than the originals. See the assets list for more detailed creation information.

I had an issue with the creation of music, as my asset list was so full of more important sounds to create and there was already music in the game files to keep me interested. If there was time I would have created a heavy metal track (as I had originally hoped to do) however such an undertaking would be similar to our project for audio arts last semester- and I cannot do three projects for the price of two! In any case, I found a royalty free dance/dark-ambient song on soundsnap.com, and played around with it for it to fit the game. Aside from the music, the issues I had with sound creation were all Internet related. The cost of downloading quality sound files built up to a point where I had to just work with what I had, but really only the 'Hagar' gun and its associated files bore the brunt of that (I didn't do it). I approached a composition student to compose some music for the main menu, however they later became unavailable to do so.

Overall I am pleased with the result, and it certainly sounds a lot better than the original sounds (success!). I had great fun creating the sounds, especially the foley recordings. In retrospect I think the shotgun could have sounded a bit more shotgun-like, however the original was absolutely horrendous. In the end I simply tried to make sure the sounds did not get annoying over time, and this was often a reason for going back to the drawing board with a sound.