RUINER: Sound Redesign

Original Sound Redesign (2020)

Latest Sound Redesign (2022)

A Prior Project

My RUINER Sound Redesign was actually a prior project I had done nearly two years beforehand. The knowledge and experience I possessed of sound design, in general, were to be desired. However, after years of research and practice, I decided to completely redo the project in its entirety to show just how much I had developed since my initial attempt.

Design Principles of the Pre-Production Process

There were a handful of goals in mind for approaching this particular project again:

1. To surpass my initial attempt in terms of stereo fidelity and production quality.

2. To synthesize a number of sounds together to yield interesting sound effects that were fitting to the setting and action.

3. To mix and balance the effects so that everything in the action could be distinguished.

Production

The project was relatively simple to approach from a pre-production phase. I scoured Freesound.org for quality samples to supplement the more mundane sounds in the project. These include the swinging of the protagonist's metal pipe, the pipe's impact noises, footsteps on the metal flooring, and environmental noises such as glass breaking and car noises.

With much of the more rudimentary sound effects implemented, I began to experiment with my approach to designing the more complex sounds for the project through sound synthesis. Much of the weapons needed to sound "futuristic" to emphasize the notion that the game was set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future.

Below are two specific examples:

1. The shotgun that the protagonist in the video uses needed to sound "punchy" and "cybernetic". To accomplish this, I began with a simple sample of a shotgun blast and layered it with two other effects. I incorporated a sort of brief, high-pitched whirring noise before the shotgun fired. The idea that the weapon functioned like a railgun, relying on electronic machinery to power up the projectile before firing it, highlighting the sound of the shotgun's firing blast. The next sound effect layered over the shotgun was a "static" hissing noise that would play immediately after the weapon fired - achieved entirely by using audio of someone wielding metal. This was to indicate that the weapon required a brief cooling period due to the amount of heat generated from firing. From there, I simply used EQ adjustment and compression to help merge these three samples into a cohesive sound effect.

2. Dashing was a particular effect that I wanted to sound distinct from the other effects used in the project. While difficult to explain with any logical reasoning, I approached it with the suspense of disbelief. To me, the dashing in the game appeared like a sort of brief, technological acceleration of mass from one point to another. In order to imply this through sound alone, I created a synthesizer preset that distorts a multi-voice saw wave before feeding it through a strict low-pass filter. From there, I used a combination of self-created glitch effects, as well as free samples found on Freesound.org, and began layering a variety of these glitch effects over the original bass synth sample, applied EQ and compression, and created a final product that, I think, fit the dash and overall setting very well.

Voice Acting

The voice actress at the beginning of the video is Hope Nasr, a friend and fellow game designer at my university. In wanting to redesign the entirety of the project, I knew I wanted to further edit her voice recordings to better fit the overall aesthetic and world of RUINER. I began by applying different types of distortion to her voice before eventually settling for a preset I had created with CamelCrusher. It gave her voice a sort of radio-like filtering quality that I felt fit the setting perfectly. Next, I began to double down on this static radio aspect of the modified samples by duplicating the samples, splicing certain sections to repeat or stutter, pitching parts up or down, and sometimes even overlaying them over one another. Then, to further contribute to the aesthetic I was aiming for, I added spliced sections of static and glitching to encapsulate the entirety of the glitchy radio signal from a dystopian future. The end result fit the character exceptionally well in my opinion, largely due to the fact that the character "HER" eventually reveals itself to be an artificial intelligence that has manipulated the character throughout the entirety of the game.

The Final Product

The final stage of the project was quite difficult to manage with so many sounds playing simultaneously amidst the combat. To me, the ambience of the environment was certainly an important aspect of the project since it helped propagate the belief of a dystopian, high-tech future. Since the start of the project, most of the sound effects were categorized under groups of busses: some of these were labeled as environmental, ambience, gore sound effects, weapons, impacts, and cinematic busses.

To ensure that all of these sound effects could be heard simultaneously while also not detracting attention from the focal point of the video at any given moment, I created a hierarchical system of sidechaining that would only sidechain sounds based on importance at any given moment in the final mix. Even with EQ having been applied to nearly every sound effect within the composition, frequency clashing was inevitable. As such, this sidechaining system was my solution that appeared to work rather well as an experiment.