S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Sins of the Zone

Historical Context and Modifying the Game

To begin, the first step of the project was to improve the overall visual fidelity of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Anomaly. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game franchise was developed by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World and each sequel to ‘Shadow of Chernobyl’ expanded on the universe and mechanics. Their vision and working title for the first game, inspired by the "Roadside Picnic" novel authored by the Strugatsky brothers, underwent heavy revision as the team encountered numerous issues in trying to fulfill their ambition. As a result, a great deal of content was cut from the game to ensure its release after numerous prior delays. The following two sequels were developed in rapid succession and failed to realize their initial vision for the project.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly is an aspiring project devised by the passionate fans of the original series. It sought to combine the levels from all three installments as a free standalone mod for others to download. With the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fanbase possessing a number of talented modders, they eventually began to further modify these individual titles before a group consolidated them into the singular project that is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly.

It’s been a little over half a decade since Anomaly was released. Its visuals are fairly outdated, drawing heavily on the previous titles that were released in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The fact that all three titles were released within three years should raise a red flag in terms of their quality. Regardless, I knew full well that the audio I created for the project would largely be impacted by the visuals and gameplay presented. Sound design can only go so far if the gameplay recordings look mediocre. With this in mind, I set out to modify the Anomaly’s shaders, lighting, and textures using community-created mods.

Roughly four-to-five days were spent tinkering with these systems, trying to optimize them in tandem with my computer’s hardware. I ran into a number of problems that I had to troubleshoot: displaying black screens on loading into the game, all environmental objects appearing as black silhouettes, the lighting, and skybox appearing blown out due to issues with the game’s bloom coding, etc. There were two instances where I had to scrap everything, redownload both Anomaly and the mods, and start the modding process all over again. The game’s engine is a fan-modified version of GSC World’s X-Ray engine - dubbed Monolith by Anomaly’s creators – that solves a number of issues present in the original games. the Monolith engine is meticulous in detecting missing files or inconsistencies with critical folders and crashing the moment you start the game if there is a problem.

Playing the Game, Recording Gameplay, Writing the Script

Once the game’s visuals were improved through hours and hours of diligent tinkering and research, the next goal was to record the necessary footage that would serve as the basis for my sound design project. This part appeared a simple and straightforward process, but it soon became apparent that this was not the case. Several factors impacted the process of recording gameplay. For one, I decided to play as one of the game’s minor factions, Sin.

Without getting into too much detail about the game’s premise, Sin is a small cell of religious/nihilistic fanatics who worship the game’s dangerous setting: hunting scientific researchers, curious explorers, ruthless cutthroats, and veterans who would threaten “the Zone”. Within Anomaly, they resonate fairly well with the game’s themes, in my personal opinion, and I sought to adjust the creative direction of my project to showcase this faction as well as Anomaly’s gameplay. While playing through the game I wrote a script for the Sin faction based on my own interpretation of the sect. I then began thinking of ways to frame the project around them since they are a rather obscure and mysterious group within S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S lore. The script would function as a sort of narration throughout the video, and, wanting to stay true to the game’s roots, I began searching for a voice actor on multiple sites who could assist in helping me translate my English script into Russian and voice the dialogue. It took a great deal of time and effort, but I was successful in contacting someone who expressed interest.

Over 150 gigabytes of footage was recorded for this particular project, and much of it was scrapped and consolidated into a 5-minute segment because of glaring issues with the gameplay. The game’s enemy AI was fairly buggy, frequently ruining any promising footage. Enemy animations would glitch (locking them into a perpetual, looping reloading animation for no apparent reason) and clunky stealth mechanics would sometimes cause enemies to aim directly at the ground below them and wander around while trying to find me. Suffice to say, these occurrences were goofy and contrasted with my goals of capturing the darker and more serious tones of the game. In addition to these issues, trying to artificially provoke intense or interesting scenarios was exceptionally difficult. Despite this, I was able to capture adequate footage with enough time and patience.

Editing Gameplay and Preparing Production

With the necessary recordings having been obtained at this point I immediately set about editing the footage in Adobe Premiere Pro. Much of the recordings were ultimately scrapped due to their enormous file size and ultimately lackluster content. All of the original audio associated with the gameplay was deleted to omit any influence on my creative decisions when the time came to create my own audio using free samples. This particular project was a concept that I had spent a great deal of time contemplating both the creative direction and how to approach it with practicality in mind. As such, the final product was already roughly envisioned, and the only thing was to draft the script and begin sorting the footage.

Throughout the editing process, I began preemptively creating a list of sound effects that I would need later in the project while studying the footage. These ranged from different types of environmental ambience/atmosphere, various types of footsteps on different surfaces, accurate weapon sound effects, bullet impacts and ricochets, rustling cloth, and voice lines. In taking breaks from editing the footage, I began browsing Freesound.org to begin collecting samples and sorting them into appropriately categorized folders. Despite initially collecting hundreds of assets, I found myself continuing to scour Freesound.org to find better quality sound effects to replace those of poor quality or to procure sound effects that I had overlooked early on.

Voice Acting

After creating the first draft of the script I was dead set on finding someone to help me translate the script from English into Russian and, perhaps, another to do the voice acting in Russian. My options were fairly limited, as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise was something of a niche. Trying to find someone who fluently spoke English and Russian was something of another challenge that I would have to tackle. However, my familiarity and experience with Reddit would yield fruitful results. I began to post on several different threads explaining the situation, that while I was learning Russian I was neither fluent nor confident in my ability to voice the script myself. Several days had passed with no reply before a user reached out to lend his assistance. Jocques Kraken, similarly, another audio student attending university, offered to do both the translation and voice acting for the project.

Having done sound design in the past, I found that often it is significantly easier to establish an understanding when provided a video or an audio clip containing something akin of the desired product, rather than just simply explaining it in words alone. Interpretation of direction, particularly sound, is something that greatly differs from person to person. Examples of preexisting works are the quickest means by which to recreate or use as a foundation to build upon. To better help Jocques I provided clips of “Eastern Promises”, starring Viggo Mortensen – explaining that I wanted the script to seem as if it had been read by someone who was ultimately detached from the world; cold, remorseless, but possessed a conviction and certainty. Within a matter of days, Jocques had translated and recorded the voice lines after providing him with the second draft of the script.

The First Draft

With the script having been recorded, I set about editing the audio that Jocques had given me. However, upon hearing his voice for the first time I encountered something of an obstacle. His voice was too high-pitched to appropriately fit the video’s tone. In concluding that I couldn’t afford to scour the internet in hopes of attracting another voice actor (the invasion of Russia into Ukraine had begun by this time), I decided to make do with the resources that I had at my disposal. Using FL Studio’s amazing pitch capabilities, Jocques’ lines were pitched down just enough to achieve a deeper tone. To further support the adjustment, I duplicated the pitched samples, EQ’d these duplicates through a lowpass filter, applied some compression, and lowered the volume just enough for the duplicated samples to compliment the adjusted pitching when played at the same time. Overall, I felt that the final result worked fairly well considering that the pitch change wasn’t very noticeable.

After rending my adjustments to the voiceover, I began to piece together the footage in Adobe Premiere Pro with the finalized voice samples. This helped me get a feel for the overall flow of the footage, ensuring that transitions between shots didn’t happen too abruptly or slowly. The first draft of the video edit had been concluded at this stage of the project and production would soon begin.

Routing, processing, and The Final Product

Before the implementation of sound effects, it dawned on me that a critical component of the project would rely heavily on how tracks were routed. There were certain scenes within the video that would require different types of reverb and delay processing to accurately represent the space of those environments; examples being the interior of an abandoned building with a wooden floor and an old warehouse. I used pen and paper to outline the overall premise for how routing would be established, contemplating the best method in which to route the correlating sound effects to auxiliary tracks for processing in these environments before being routed into buses that then collectively fed into a singular print track.

With my initial outline completed for how the sound effects would be categorized and routed, I could then begin to approach asset implementation and design. Despite having preplanned the project’s routing, I would inevitably make a number of adjustments to better suit the processing required for specific sound effects in their respective environments. This was certainly an enlightening process because I devised a few different methods with which to apply effect processing to a multitude of samples.

At this stage in the project, I took notes of glaring issues and documented my thoughts as to how the audio could be refined to better fit the recordings. Much time and effort was spent fine-tuning the details of the various sound effects through means of EQ, compression, and limiters before gradually mixing everything down to create a suitable product.