Revelations #3: Echoes of Antioch

Hello everyone!

My name is Miku Łapacz and I’m the Audio Generalist responsible for the sonic layer of the SacriFire experience. Since very early childhood I’ve always been around games through my dad, which resulted in my love for them and the deep motivation to contribute a part of myself in this beautiful industry.

Apart from the very respectable works of the Western world, over the years I have grown an insatiable liking for all Japanese media and became a great fan of many JRPGs and animes. Some of my favorites are the Persona series and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which both have become a primary inspiration for SacriFire’s tonal palette.

Thus, a question remains. How does one combine the sleek and stylish tastefulness that Persona is abundant with and the absolute bass mayhem and power-scaling distortion that JoJo’s sound effects are reverend for?

Turns out the answer has been Antioch itself all along, as it encapsulates the perfect balance of gorgeous and noble pixel art with some of the most intense JRPG combat I had the pleasure of playing. This Devlog will touch on the work I’ve been doing for the past year as Pixelated Milk’s in-house sound designer.

The Background World - ambience and world sound effects as the foundation of reality

I would like to start with something that I usually start with whenever I’m beginning to work on a new scene, which is the background of the location. There's the room tone, the wind, the rustling of leaves on a tree, the background chatter in a town. These things might seem like small details and insignificant compared to music or combat sound effects but what they really do is place the listener in a specific place. It grounds the reality of any situation and gives life to the scene.

The subconscious realization of the present living and breathing world lets the player’s suspension of disbelief take over and enjoy any and every setting, no matter how far from reality it might be. Here are some of my favorites so far.

Waveform Decapitation - how some good old distortion makes combat feel visceral

Amongst all things, I’m probably the biggest fan of intense battles and gore, and while SacriFire is not an action horror game, it does have some heavy hitting combat thanks to the weighty animations and strong visual effects. Designing audio for that is always a field day for me!

One of the goals of our combat system is to Stagger the enemy by filling their gauge and breaking them, dealing critical damage and stopping them in their tracks. When I first heard of this mechanic and saw it in gameplay, I immediately thought of Star Platinum’s iconic “The World” attack and it clearly inspired me in making the sound. At the same time, I also wanted to create some kind of a jingle to be played as soon as the game registers a Stagger hit, something akin to the Persona 5’s All-Out Attack.

And if there’s one thing I learned from JoJo is that distortion really is key to solve it all when it comes to the oomph that is necessary for any confrontation to feel like it’s either do or die. That’s why when creating such combat sound effects, I often rely on my Holy Trinity of distortion plugins, Saturn by FabFilter, Faturator by Kilohearts and the one and only, Decapitator by Soundtoys. Listen to how it all came to be.

Here’s some more footage of SacriFire’s intense combat with all its SFX glory. I had a lot of fun making all of these.

The Platformer Experience - foley for the win

When you think about it, moving about is how you spend most of your time in any game. You have to get from point A to point B, get over obstacles, approach your enemies, etc. In SacriFire, there are many platformer elements to our dungeon exploration gameplay so I knew I had to get all the movement sounds right to enrich the whole experience.

And for that you definitely need good foley, meaning sound effects synchronized to the movement of a character, such as footsteps, cloth and armor, grabs, and so on. Right now, for Ezekiel there are sounds for his armor, cape, footsteps (6 different surfaces), jump, double jump, falling, land, dash, roll, slide, grab and ledge grab. You could also add teleporting sounds but they are not exactly foley.

Some platforming action from one of our Erebus dungeons.

To properly implement and time the sounds to specific animations, in cooperation with our programmers, we came up with an Animation Event system in Unity that lets me attach FMOD events to any animation in the game. It’s incredibly convenient and enables me to do all the foley work myself, without any additional help from different team members.

There’s also a separate system for footsteps alone, as it requires a more profound approach linked to the surface detection system, so that the parameter responsible for switching between different footstep types can function properly. Unfortunately, in some rare cases, the Animation Event system played back some sounds later than expected. This has been the case with the ledge grab sound, which resulted in a delayed feedback in movement, making climbing feel a bit sluggish. To circumvent that, special code had to be written that plays the particular FMOD event right as the game recognizes a ledge climb action.

What it looks like in Unity.

Sound, Camera, Play! - doing sound design for cutscenes in an interactive environment

Any JRPG is obviously very rich in story telling, and cutscenes are crucial to putting across special sequences that the usual gameplay loop can’t achieve. After all, how are we supposed to know how tough the final boss is if there’s no introduction prior?

The difference between a game cutscene (especially real-time ones, like in SacriFire) and linear media like anime is that while the camera does take away player control for a moment, we are still set in the very same scene in which we were just running about freely. The problem is, some sounds that are needed in dungeon exploration, are at the same time potentially annoying in a cutscene, like Checkpoints present in dungeons. Or if the camera flies away from the player character, how do we make it so that we hear what it sees? And what about changing shots and idling audio emitters suddenly cutting out due to the sudden jump of distance?

Once again, we came up with some solutions to all of these. In the case of annoying sounds that shouldn’t grab our attention in a cutscene, I made a simple VCA group in FMOD with a loudness parameter from which I manually link specific events. Then I created an event which turns the parameter to silence and places it on the timeline of any cutscene that will benefit from this workaround.

To hear through the camera’s perspective when it’s away from the player we created a script that takes the FMOD Listener from Ezekiel and puts it in front of the camera, sort of like a boom mic on a film set.

Here’s what it looks like, detached from Ezekiel, put in between the actors, in front of the camera.

Lastly, what if the camera changes in the middle of a cutscene and travels a substantial distance over the level but at the same time, suddenly cutting short all idle background world looping sounds? For that, I created another VCA and event that works the same way as the previous one, which is played on every camera change in Unity’s cutscene timeline. It’s purpose is to gently fade-out and fade-in all the looping sounds in the scene.

What it sounds like in practice.

Here’s a part of Ezekiel’s Ascension ceremony with some helpful visualizations.

The Ultimate Showdown - some of what SacriFire has to offer

As always, I saved the best for last. Please enjoy this compilation of only a little portion of all the awesome sound effects that I got to create on this amazing journey and trust me, there’s still much more to come!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1661330/SacriFire/