Acoustic Sound Design

Acoustic Sound Design - Tunic Redesign

Exploring foley methods of creating unique, interesting sound design for games

The aim of this project was to figure out how far I could get designing some sounds using only objects in my house and minimal processing. Although I often record my own sounds, I usually rely on a lot of audio processing techniques to alter these recordings and make them more exciting. For this project however, I focused on getting the best sounds I could out of each object, and limiting myself to only simple EQ, reverb and compression plugins for processing.

The game I chose to make sounds for is Tunic, an isometric action-adventure game in which the player controls a fox character exploring a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The original sound design was created by PowerUp audio, and is quite heavily synthesised, hence why I thought it would be a good choice for my more acoustic approach - plus it's just one of my favourite games :)

Experimentation

Here are the objects I decided to use:

- Baking Tray
- Glass Thermometer
- Plastic Jar
- Wooden Drawers
- Glass Bottles
- Hinges in a bag
- Tea strainer
- House tin
- Plastic bag
- Cookie cutter
- Fork
- Screwdriver

Here are some of the observations I made while experimenting with the objects:

Baking Tray:

- Different tines have different tones, with the same resonant pitch on top

- Pressing down on the tray causes it to reverberate less, leading to a more string-like pluck sound

Drawers:

- Each draw sounds slightly different, with the empty one sounding the most hollow

- Shaking a draw or the whole cabinet gives the texture of the objects inside, combined with the wood they are hitting against

Gingerbread Man Shape:

- Each arm/leg/head produces a slightly different pitch when scraped against a surface

- Scraping against paper produces the clearest tone

Metal House Tin:

- Scraping over the holes in the tin creates a hollow metal tone, which can be altered with gesture, this is best achieved with the screwdriver

Glass Bottles:

- The bottles produce different a amount of resonance and pitch depending on how full or empty they are

Video

ReDesign Clips

Teleport:

For this sound I used recordings of the glass thermometer, metal hinges, gingerbread man shape and the tea strainer

For the movement of the platform I used the rocky, scraping sounds of the hinges combined with the thermometer clinking for the charging element, the gingerbread man for some shaped noise and the tea strainer as a moment of impact

Checkpoint:

For this sound I used recordings of the house tin, metal tea strainer and the plastic bag

For the player pressing the button I used 2 layers of the tea strainer pluck, combined with a reverby swirling of the metal tin and a crunchy plastic bag for the background textures. I also repeated the tea strainer sounds, but reversed, for the fade back in

Laser Gun:

For this sound I used recordings of the baking tray plucks, plastic jar hits, drawer shaking as well as plastic bag and hinges textures

For the sound of the gunshots I layered the baking tray plucks and plastic jar hits with the sound of me shaking the hinges bag. The loading sound is the hinges and plastic, and the charging sound is the rumbling of the baking tray combined with shaking hinges

This sound was the most challenging for me to create because I haven't made many gun sounds in the past, so I did end up using some compression from OTT, just to help things sound a bit harsher.