Legends of Eisenwald - Development Diary #12

Aterdux Entertainment has posted the next Developer Diary for Legends of Eisenwald. The new update is a continuation of the last update about sound effects.

Developers Diaries #12: Sound effects #2

In the process of creative task  a sound designer considers the tools that were selected for the process. It’s not just programs and equipment that ara used but it’s more about classification and manyfold of used sounds, a structure of the game engine, and what is especially important, what does the game engine allows to do. Main difficulties could be expected on a treshold where two worlds – technical and creative – collide.

We never dealt with sound on the level we want to have at the release of Legends of Eisenwald, so we didn’t have experience of this serious work until the moment we started dealing with it. Before working on the sound, our technical director Nikolay Armonik started working on our engine that we called Aterdux Engine 9. He needed a year to create a flexible game engine that could easily be used to make either a shooter, sports game or an open world RPG. Big and ambitious for our small studio project included plans to make a game that could be played and replayed many times but in the end it required some compromises and limitations so development of the game would not be too long.

Programming tools that we used took away such possibilites as classification of equipment and weapons in a database. Now in the game there are 4 types of armor, and a few weapon types determined by the engine. We had to use some assumptions – for example a leather armor and a brigandine sound the  same even though we all understand that metal under a fabric is not leather, even a riveted one.

Another issue with programming tools was not a simplest method of combining sound with animation. For example, when a weapon hits a shield, there is a separate sound. To make it in the game, we can’t just enhance original sample with a sort of a “slide effect”, but we have to record it as a separate file.

We thought how we could combine sounds and resolve some other issues and maybe we found a way. There is a big chance that we will buy a separate sound engine FMOD that is uses in games like Diablo 3, World of Tanks, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This engine has very rich selection of possibilities and existing solutions that could simplify our life. If this happens, we will make a separate post in our diaries!

Legends of Eisenwald will include also such interesting possibilities like panorama sounds on the map and in the battle depending on the location of camera, sound with reverberation and sound combinations. If we decide to buy FMOD, this will be a great influence for these possibilities.