It’s hard to believe that inFamous Second Son is a year old already!  I’ve been completely lagging on finishing up these posts about the powers design for the game, so let me use this opportunity to make good and present the first of the final 2 parts of this series. I will hopefully get around to posting my presentation on the Systems Design for the game soon as well so those who haven’t heard/seen it can have the information available to them. Anyway, on to the magic and mystery of concrete!

For those who haven’t played or seen inFamous Second Son you play a guy who gets superpowers battling an authoritarian government agency called the DUP whose soldiers are all imbued with concrete superpowers by their leader Dana Augustine (as normally happens with government agencies).

The biggest challenge for us with concrete was how to make it sound unique. It’s just rocks and stone right? We’ve all heard countless variations on rock sounds in everything from impacts to destruction and rubble/debris sounds. We needed to figure out ways to make our sounds stand out as unique, while also conveying the power of the enemies in the game who used concrete.

The powers ran the gamut from concrete grenades to spawning concrete shields to launching off spires of concrete and forming a concrete balcony on walls. In short there was tons of concrete objects being created and broken in the world. Not only did we need these to sound unique and “powered” but they also had to sound completely distinct from all the “normal” concrete in the world you could destroy or collide other objects with. It was a huge challenge, but one that Andy Martin was definitely up for.

The place to start, naturally, was by buying a bunch of concrete. I looked into the process of concrete, which is usually just a mixture of water, an aggregate like sand or gravel, and Portland cement (named after a type of stone used in the UK, not the sleepy hamlet of the Pacific Northwest of the US). While the thought of mixing up my own concrete sounded appealing to my construction worker wannabe side, we weren’t in a position in the project where we had limitless time to experiment. So we did the next best thing: went to Home Depot. Andy and I both made trips to the hardware store and bought all kinds of concrete and stone, from paver stones (which were often too resonant) to clay bricks, cinder blocks, and more. They were demolishing a building across the street from my house and I noticed some particularly large chunks of both asphalt and concrete sitting on the other side of the fence. I waited until nightfall, donned my ninja costume (really just a bathrobe with a scarf tied around my head) and absconded with the almost-final resources we would need to make our concrete powers come to life.

From here, Andy began to run wild and experiment with all kinds of torture he could enact on our various pieces of concrete. From scraping everything against the slabs from metal disks to binder clips to resonating a jews harp against them to, yes, crushing, beating and destroying, he created an elaborate and unique palette of concrete sounds. As a few of the characters in the game developed, their powers also evolved. Some characters now had “beams” of concrete they would shoot out to shield allies while another burrowed underground like Bugs Bunny on his way to Albuquerque, and another sat atop a giant swirling tornado of concrete chunks. We needed something unique here and I devised a way to record a constantly moving collection of some of the concrete chunks we had broken (and wrote up a blog post about it here).

Andy’s wizardry both in recording these sounds and in shaping them in ProTools and Wwise into the layers of concrete powers was top notch as always and now it was time to show the team what we’d been doing (and that our jobs are more fun than theirs). Below is another Sonic Equation of sorts which we showed at a company meeting demonstrating some of recording techniques used to make the concrete powers of Second Son:

Thanks again for reading. I hope to get a write-up of the video powers (which naturally entailed a lot of fun creative recording and manipulation) done next week in time for the proper anniversary of Second Son’s release. Stay tuned!

In contrast to past inFAMOUS games, Second Son was a tricky beast in that our power sets were pretty abstract. Electricity can really hurt someone, but smoke, neon, and video? This was definitely one of the many challenges we faced with the sound design of the powers. For neon, we took a pretty direct approach and then got creative with our source materials.

We struggled early on with making neon sound “neon” and not “laser.” There was some confusion during development in which power we were making as those two words were often interchangeable. (Fetch even refers to herself at one point in the game as “Laser Girl”. Making her sounds laser-y was ok, but at the same time I didn’t want to tread on the hallowed ground of Ben Burtt. I actually cursed his name a few times during production because Andy had made some beautiful sounds that unfortunately sounded too Star-Wars-laser-gun. Andy  had a REALLY long spring (originally an induction coil for an industrial kiln we got from a local glass maker named Chris Daly) attached to the ceiling of his office. Whenever he would accidentally hit it, I would hear the telltale “pew pew” in my office next door.

The first element we captured which really felt “neon” was an actual neon tube. We have a couple Sly Cooper neon signs in the office, so I took my Barcus Berry contact mic and attached it to one and got some really nice neon hum. For more variety we captured a bunch of fluorescent lights as well, both via contact mics and using a Sennheiser MKH 8060 to capture various flickering sounds of turning them on and off. I have a very old fluorescent fixture in my house that created some amazing sounds which we ended up using for neon power sources powering down. And Delsin’s neon drain was composed of several tracks of neon hum processed through Izotope Iris with various frequencies cutout and some filter sweeps.

For the rest of Delsin’s powers, Andy got REALLY creative. As you’ll see in the video below no sounds were off limits and we used a broad range of varied sounds to create the final neon palette. Andy used Zynaptiq’s Morph plugin extensively to do some interesting blends of EMF interference and various hits on the aforementioned induction coil. Other tricks up our sleeve included an old signal generator I have which emits square and sine wave sweeps and some very cool power on and off sounds and a crazy electric shocking device from the 50s which would shoot small arcs of electricity at anything you put near it.

Once we got our power set close to completion, it was time for another milestone meeting and thus time for another movie to show off our work. The response from the team from our previous movie, the smoke “Sonic Equation,” was so overwhelmingly positive, I felt compelled to do another. Sure the equation doesn’t EXACTLY equate to the sounds as they are in the game, but it at least shows off part of our design methodology as well as the fun we’re still having.

Next time, we’ll discuss the enemy concrete powers and show some of the abuse we wrought upon varied chunks of concrete!

You know how sometimes you have lofty plans to do a project and then months later you think, “What the hell happened? I still haven’t gotten to that thing I meant to do months ago!” Well that’s pretty much where I’m at. I’ve been meaning to write a few short posts about some of the sound design we did on inFAMOUS Second Son for quite some time, and I’m FINALLY getting around to it. I hope this to be the first in a series of posts with an entertaining movie or two showing off some of the sounds we captured to make our various sfx in Second Son and how those ended up sounding in-game. Since the powers are the biggest sonic show piece of the game, I figured we’d start there.

A lot has already been written about smoke power, but since it’s the first power you gain in the game, I’ll touch briefly on it one more time in part just to show you the movie below.

But before that here’s something which may be of interest that has never been seen or heard outside of Sucker Punch.  The first thing we ever did in regards to powers on Second Son was to concept some ideas of what these powers may sound like. We had NO idea what they were going to look like (and as you can see from the video we were even concepting powers that never made the cut into the game). This was merely an exercise to start playing with sound and seeing what kinds of things were resonating with us in regards to these potential power sets. A lot of what we started with helped inform our extensive recording sessions to capture elements to mold and bend to our will. Other concepts we tried here didn’t work and were abandoned. For example, I thought it would be cool if the player’s footsteps had a sweetener applied to them based on your current power set. In the end it felt too heavy handed so we cut it. We played around with the notion of USTV feeds making their way into the video powers sounds (similar to Andy’s Neil Armstrong clip in the concept for what was then called TV powers), but that also just didn’t work in any meaningful way. None of the sounds you hear in this concept made it into the game, but it at least gave Andy, our senior sound designer, and myself a jumping off point to explore from.

Smoke was the first power we worked on, but it was also one of the most challenging: how do you make something as amorphous as smoke sound powerful? Furthermore, how do you make it sound like smoke, and by that I mean NOT like fire. These were the challenges before us. I noticed some steam pouring out from a grate in the ground one day and thought that could be interesting. But it made no sound! We experimented with other air releases from helium tanks and compressed air, but none of it fit the bill. I pretty quickly gravitated towards charcoal. I don’t mean those neatly-formed imitation charcoal briquettes either. I’m talking real burned chunks of wood. I knew from ample barbecuing experience that they made really interesting crackling sounds when burned and also they had a resonance to them when moving around which was kinda unique. After buying a couple bags of charcoal and a small grill I set to work doing most imaginable things to these chunks of burnt wood: moving them around, bouncing them off each other, crushing them, burning them, lighting them on fire and then dousing them, etc. It was a great start. Many other elements ended up playing into the final sounds: surprisingly blowing air through a plastic tube became a very important element in Delsin’s smoke dash and various movements of sand also played a role in both quicker smoke attacks and Delsin’s navigation abilities. Below is a video showing off some of these elements as they were recorded and as they sounded in the game. One quick word on this video: it was originally shown as part of a company meeting. Every milestone during production, each team would show a short video highlighting their work over the past several weeks. We liked to show the team not only how much fun sound design is, but how much fun we have doing it.  Enjoy and stay tuned next week for an exposé on Neon powers!

While I’m proud of so much of the audio design in inFamous Second Son, one feature stands out as a testament to never letting go of a good idea. It was a concept, not new or necessarily innovative, that began incubating around 7 years ago. It wasn’t until 2013 that I was able to make the idea work in a title. I thought it’d be fun to trace that feature from its nascent stages through to its full fledged life. To do so, we have to go all the way back in time to a year we called 2007. Ah 2007! There was a palpable hum in the air. The iPhone was introduced by a little upstart company called Apple, Microsoft excitedly released their newest blockbuster (*cough*) Operating System, Vista, and the Nintendo Wii had captured people’s hearts, minds, wrists, and pocketbooks.

I was working at Shaba Games, where we had just finished up the DLC/Gold Edition of Marvel Ultimate Alliance and were looking for a new project. Like many others, we were captivated by the Wii and began working on a concept for a downhill skateboarding game for the platform. Shaba’s other sound designer, Lorien Ferris, and myself began brainstorming ways we could introduce interesting audio to what would ostensibly be a multiplayer racing game. Obviously the skateboard sounds would reign supreme and we came up with an idea of emitters tied to occluder objects such as buildings which would play a quick whoosh as you passed them (an idea I would later harvest for the mobile title, SummitX Snowboarding). Another idea we had was to have music emanating from buildings as you skated by. You’d be going fast and could never go back uphill, so they could be short loops, and once we applied some doppler it would sound awesome!

Unfortunately, while the Wii as a piece of hardware was popular for a slew of years, the software didn’t seem to sell as well, so the project was scrapped before we got very far. BUT after multiple other false starts we were finally given something wholly different and rather exciting: Spider-Man, and what would eventually become Web of Shadows. The goal was straightforward: create a new, unique open world Spider-Man game using the engine from the recently released Spider-man 3. Once again Lorien and I dove into brainstorming cool new features we could implement on the audio front to push the superhero qualities of Spider-man and the real life interactivity of the city. Early on, our storefront music concept was revived. I even added some various loops to embed into some stores simulating dance and jazz clubs and restaurants. Unfortunately we ran into some design problems early on: the storefronts we had in the game didn’t really match the music, they were destructible but we didn’t have a signal to turn off the music when the store was destroyed, and truthfully it just didn’t sound super-convincing to have the sound of filtered talking and clinking dishes and glasses of a restaurant while you’re right outside fighting. You think there’d be screams and hushed whispers. Basically with a tight schedule and a skeleton crew, our storefront music plans would have to wait for another day…

…which came just a year and a half later. We were working on a new superhero title and, with so much of the infrastructure in place now, we spent some time focusing on how to make storefronts believable. We created a multi-stage approach: idle, which would be the default and would play a basic ambient loop. For example some cheesy Italian music emanating from a restaurant. If a fight broke out in the vicinity we would enter a threatened state which would trigger an appropriate one-shot sound effect of screams and maybe instruments falling, dishes breaking, etc. and the music would cease. During high-tension moments (using the same tension meter as our interactive music system) the stores would be silent. Once tension went back down to low, we would slowly ramp up the idle state again until another fight broke out. Perfect plan! Unfortunately the studio ended up shifting gears and we moved from superhero games to music games. The storefront music would lay dormant again…

Fast forward to early 2012. I had just joined Sucker Punch and we were in pre-production on inFamous Second Son. Being back in an open world title, I pretty quickly started to think about my beloved storefront music concept again. Everyone I pitched it to from our creative director to our music team down at Sony HQ loved the concept. So now it was time to design it. The first step was just to get looping sounds emitting from a point in space and figuring out proper attenuation and processing for them. Next it was time to get into the real nitty gritty. I had several challenges to tackle:

A world inside a world

inFamous Second Son takes place in present-day/slightly-future Seattle. It’s not real Seattle, it’s our take on the city, but we still wanted it to be a unique, diverse, funky place, just like real Seattle. We did not want it to be full of grunge music (and that is a story for another day!). I began talking with the environment team to get a sense of the variety of storefronts we would have, and some of what they created helped influence my ideas. Early on, we got an Irish Pub in the game. At which point I thought, man that’d be cool to have it play Irish music during the day and then become a punk club at night. Just like in real life! Then I started to take it further: what if we had traditional Irish music in the earlier times of day, changing to more upbeat, raucous Irish music in the evening and THEN a punk club at night. I was on to something. As we fleshed out the stores my list of music grew and grew. I wanted jazz and Chinese and J-Pop, club, top 40, and why not mariachi music in the Mexican restaurant and thai music, new age music for the yoga studio, and hell even Russian music to put into apartments where the Akulan gangs live? Sure they’re musical stereotypes, but they’re serving the purpose of a low ambient bed, they were never meant to be featured sounds. The result will be filling the city with greater perceived life. I also wanted to reach out to some local bands and get them featured in the game as well. I wanted a lot. So how the hell were we gonna get all this music?

APM to the rescue!

As anyone who’s worked with Sony can attest to, they have some of the most amazingly talented, brilliant people working in their music department. We were very fortunate to have a few of them working closely with us throughout the project. Beyond the game score, we started discussing this source music idea and they carved out some of their budget for a blanket license from APM for stock music. Matt Levine worked directly with APM who would put together playlists for various genres of music we were interested in. He would then send me the lists, which I would review, make notes and approve or ask for more. In the end, we had over 100 tracks in the game spread out over 8 times of day. On the local band side, having been in a band and played with some acts up here I reached out to some friends’ bands and also KEXP, the local college station, and got a list of some potential candidates, several of which made it into the final game. We also started talking to Sir Mix-A-Lot and he really wanted to get some tracks in, too. Now that we had music, we just had to get it playing in game.

Rock Against the Man

As I mentioned, I had earlier rigged up a test playing source music in a test world pretty quickly to help figure out volume, attenuation, and processing. From there, it was on to the challenging part: figuring out how to make it gel in-game. In inFamous Second Son, you play as Delsin Rowe, a rebelistic youth with super powers battling against an evil authoritarian police force, the D.U.P. (Department of Unified Protection, think of the TSA with guns, armor and superpowers). Delsin can clear the DUP out of each district of Seattle as part of the systemic, non-mission open world gameplay. The main theme here is freedom vs. security. The DUP keeps people secure, but Delsin gives them the freedom to do as they wish. To help reinforce this thematically we decided that when the DUP controls a district we’d only hear DUP music. We started with stoic, patriotic sounding cues, but steered the direction more towards syrupy, happy music that provides a wonderfully stark juxtaposition to the menace of the DUP. Once Delsin begins to drive the DUP out of a district, we stop the DUP music from playing in that area and instead let the storefronts come to life with their own individuality. We had a programmer working on the district status rigging, so I asked him to give me a callback signal for when the district status changed. I was then able to use this to determine what district the player was in and whether DUP music should be playing there (it emits from DUP speakers and closed off DUP storefronts), or whether the other storefronts should be allowed to rock in the slowly-becoming-free world. I didn’t feel my initial idea from way back about multiple states work work in this instance. The music acted more as personality for the district than simulating people inside, so I didn’t pursue any kind of multi-state reactive environment. Maybe next time!

At the same time, I wanted some semblance of reactivity and also wanted to ensure the source music didn’t clash with the game score. So I tied the volume of the source music to our tension rtpc (Real-time Parameter Control in Wwise) which is also used for controlling the music intensity. When the player got caught up in combat, the music would fade out, when the combat abated, the source music would slowly ramp back up in volume. As if the owners of the shops were peeking through their windows, and once they saw the DUP dispatched, they cranked up the tunes again. So everything was working great, but now I had dozens and dozens of songs across ten or so genres, how was I going to make it all fit in a shippable state?

Making it fit

Beyond the goal and using source music to bring more life to our fictitious Seattle, I also wanted breadth and variation within the music so you wouldn’t hear the same cue EVERY time you passed a storefront. With a blanket license from APM plus around 20 local musician tracks the content was near limitless. Our soundbank budget, unfortunately, was not. However, every time we change the time of day in the game, we do a load to bring in our new skybox and other time-specific content. In fact, I was already loading all of my ambient sounds with these time of day loads. I devised a scheme to load certain music which could play at any time of day in our core ambient bank, which is always loaded. This ended up being the DUP music and our local acts. For the rest of the store fronts, I would load in 3-5 cues per TOD per genre. This way we have some variation during each time of day, as well as completely new tracks for most storefronts for each time of day change. For the local music, we had all 20 tracks in a random playlist emanating from Sonic Boom Records (a real Seattle record store), Sir Mix-A-Lot played from some of our neon-drainable low-rider hatchbacks (we HAD to have My Hooptie for that!), and the aforementioned Irish punk club featured 3 bands each rotating through a set of 5 songs each. You could theoretically stand by the Irish pub at night and enjoy a whole night of music (if it wasn’t so much fun to run around and use your powers instead!)

My budget for the TOD banks was 7mb, of which I used 2-3mb for source music at VERY low bitrates. We processed them heavily with severe low pass filters and reverb, so we really didn’t need a lot of high end, and the lower encoded bitrates (24kbps OGG) aided in making the tracks sound like they were coming out of crappy speakers inside the storefronts. Most of the cues were edited to around 60-90 seconds since most people wouldn’t really be standing around listening to the music, and we wanted more quantity of tracks than longer songs for this reason.

Here’s a video showing off just a few of the myriad storefronts we added music to. If you have a copy of Second Son, I highly suggest pushing the DUP out of some districts and running around to see how the source music aids in filling in the world without stepping on the score or any critical gameplay. It’s a subtle effect no one would likely notice, but subtlety is often the key to effective sound design.