It can be tough starting work on audio for a new game which shares so many characteristics with a past project you’ve worked on. Mainly because it’s difficult to look with a fresh pair of eyes, or should that be ears? However, that’s exactly what we needed to do in 2007 when Introversion, and Alistair Lindsay, a talented audio veteran of the games industry, started work on the soundscape for Multiwinia, a game that shared the retro aesthetics of Darwinia, if none of the gameplay mechanics.
Despite the obvious similarities between the two games, we knew we’d be looking to create something a little distinct for Multiwinia; there were aspects of its gameplay that were fundamentally different from Darwinia, and the audio needed to reflect that. Although we planned to carry on with that same mix of surrealist textures so reminiscent of Darwinia, the new focus needed to be squarely on the multiplayer action. This was after all, inherently what Multiwinia was about – fast, chaotic stick-man slaughter, and the audio needed to inject a mixture of the comedy and violence of war found ingame.
If we take a look at a core part of the gameplay, the laser infantry skirmishes, then you’ll notice that there were two principle methods of sound design enhancement coming into play here. We had the body impact sounds (if a Darwinian is shot by a laser you will hear the thud and maybe a sizzle/rending of flesh etc), and the Darwinian combat speech. Why the combat speech? Well, you have to remember that visually the Darwinians are nothing more than simple stick-men, and as such a bold, faceless icon, the sound design needed to work hard to imbue them with a humanistic essence. In short, the audio needs to make you care about the little fellas, at least enough to make you want to rescue them from the perils of oncoming artillery fire.
Now if you are familiar with Darwinia you’ll know that the existing Darwinian vocals are quite unique and manage to convey emotional content without having to resort to recognisable words. The inspiration for this came from various sources.
Do you remember a short film made by The Two Ronnies called ‘A Day At The Sea’? Or what about childhood memories such as The Clangers, or even the Smash mashed potato commercials? Well all of these demonstrate how it’s possible to act out an entire story, and convey a whole range of thoughts and emotions, using nothing but non-verbal grunts. There are no subtitles, yet one is easily able to understand and respond to the humour or whatever emotion is being expressed, and the experience is really immersive. Alistair had also done all of the speech for Rare’s ‘Jet Force Gemini’ using the same method. If you mix all that up into a sonic bucket using a secret blend of plug-in DSP herbs and spices known only to Alistair and his co-sound designer Michael Maidment, you have the sound of the Darwinians speech.
But getting back to the task of compiling the Darwinians combat speech; we knew we wanted them to convey realistic battlefield emotions, but still sound like Darwinians, so how did we go about this? Well, one day Mark Morris, Introversion’s MD and I, went to Alistair’s studio for the day, where we could take it in turn to record some speech. We sat in the kitchen and drew up a list of what we wanted the Darwinians to say. This script encompassed stuff like ‘Get some!’, ‘I’m hit, I’m hit!’, ‘Ammo- I need more ammo’, and more complicated phrases that illustrated the many varied colours of ‘battlefield oratory’.
Keeping a straight face during recording was difficult. We’d often improvise battlefield expletives and burst out laughing moments later. Once we’d recorded these snippets of speech, Alistair set about applying various digital signal processing effects to the speech recordings, transforming them from recognisable human English, into utterly unrecognisable alien Darwinian speech, all whilst maintaining a sense of emotional congruence. The fact that what in English had started out life as ‘Get some!’ or ‘Attack!’ ended up feeling more like a ‘I’m hit!’ or a ‘Run away!’ once all the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) had been applied, just felt like part of the anarchic nature of the overall sound design that had carried over from Darwinia.
Alistair then carried out an analysis of all the finished Darwinian combat speech so it could be sorted into separate emotional categories. We ended up with three main pigeon holes; “Attack”, “I’m Hit!” and “Retreat”. These tied in pretty much to states of Darwinian behaviour that we’d witnessed when play-testing Multiwinia’s frantic infantry battles. These states could then be flagged as sound events in the game engine (like little game-code tags that tell the game to play a sound at a certain point in time), and allowed us to attach the new Darwinian combat speech to the game-play at appropriate moments.
What you end up with may sound a little chaotic in the heat of a four-player battle of the King of the Hill, with trees blazing, rounds of artillery firing and Darwinians running around on fire screaming, but it just feels right – the sounds somehow tap into our understanding of what is going on in the game moment by moment, and somehow, strangely we do end up caring about the plight of the Darwinians.
