SFX & Feedback
Strata²
This is where I'm going to put lots of sound effects and gameplay footage :D
Process
Strata² started development easily: " what if we took an arena shooter with the goal to make it for as long as you could, and turned our weakness, level design, into a part of the gameplay?" Concepts easy enough, now what about the rest? Well, that's a bit trickier
Relative locations and clear information
What information needs to be given?
Lots of information needs to be provided to the player, and preferably in the simplest most digestible way. The main things are:
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* Where are enemies?
* Where are the falling blocks?
* Did I get hit?
* Did I successfully perform my action?
* Did my hit land on the enemy?
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Of course, more is better, as long as it fulfils the requirement of clearly conveying something. This provides a bit of a challenge overall though, as the game focuses on skill and achieving the greatest result, I have to make information the very most important goal at all times, meaning a lot of sound effects need to be stripped or removed, which leads to a lot of the game sounding a bit more empty.
What tricks did I use?
I tried being clever with how I provided information, meaning lots of small tricks here and there to help clarify information, unfortunately, due to the scope of the project and the extent of the amount of sounds I needed to create, some didn't make it in, or didn't make it in the way it was planed.
Attaching a bass-heavy droning to the blocks help emulate pressure as the box nears the player, using attenuation to clarify distance.
Technical issues aroused for unknown reasons leading to the sound effect however being irregular.
After landing the box plays a heavy thud to indicate to the player that it has heavily landed, and that terrain within a close proximity has changed
Enemies play footstep sounds as they approach, using concurrencies, with a low limit we can make sure only the closest enemies have their footsteps announced, leading to audio clearly communicating the distance of the closest enemies.
Enemies additionally roar occasionally, as well as on attack to give variety and make them stand out further. On top of this, enemies check how many enemies are nearby and change sound files played to ones with more voices layered when enough enemies are present, giving an idea of the amount of enemies near the player.
A concept was toyed with at the beginning of different cries being played based on which direction the player was facing relative to the enemies location, meaning different sound effects would reveal location further than just where the sound was sourced from.
Hitmarkers need to be clear and satisfying, but I wanted to take it a step further, leading to this. What you see above is the sound cue in UE5 wherein I have a base-sound for a hitmarker which is always played when a hit lands, and below sub-sounds which are added based on conditions. The game notes which type of enemy it is and adds the sub-sound to further clarify if you hit an organic or robotic enemy, as well as if the enemy is shielded or if the hit killed.
This worked well, helping relay to the player what their shots hit, although the sound effects themselves could need some more polish to give them a slight bit more oomph.
Player Feedback
Did we tell the player they did the thing?
Player feedback, was also highly prioritized for this game. Every time the trigger was pulled, an alternative weapon was used or an ultimate cast, the player should immediately be able to tell that what they tried to do, they did.
This is where a few issues arose as more and more things was added and I started getting drowned in making sure that while the core player feedback was satisfying, I had to rush out more and more unplanned work. Nonetheless I think some of the sound effects came out well.
What shouldn't we tell the player they did?
Lots of information had to be conveyed, but to make this information stand out I decided to cut out lots of otherwise commonplace sound effects that give some form of feedback that simply wasn't necessary, mostly coming from the player character.
While when the player used the grappling hook or dashed these are abilities with cooldowns and requirements, walking has neither, and with an arena sphere around us it's easy to tell you're moving, so that was quickly stripped, making all footstep sounds come from the enemies which helped them stand out further. Some games use the distraction from your own footsteps to it's advantage such as Dead By Daylight, but we wanted clarity, not messiness although it has it's uses. I also removed the player hurt feedback, odd as it may seem as we have enough visual stimulus and player feedback pointed to it being more important for the player to be given information about what was threatening the player, rather than further feedback to notify them that they were hurt.
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