I was tasked with creating the sounds for so many fun weapons in this game! I handled the odachi, the kama, the tanegashima, foley for the yari and kusarigama as well as impact systems for hte entire arsenal of weapons Atsu has at her disposal. I redesigned the way the ignition works in the game with new unique sounds per weapon type with a little additive feel for if you have a weapon ignited while it's raining. I also captured a lot of new sounds for all the blood and gore in the game in a foley session heavily inspired by the way Denethor, the steward of Gondor, eats those cherry tomatoes in Return of the King.
Blades, Flames & So Much Blood
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Blades, Flames & So Much Blood ◦
Another fun contribution I got to work on was creating the sound design for the companion wolf! There was a lot of fun that went into this including recording special foley with coyote claws sewed onto gardening gloves and recording some efforts from my own dog at home. (Shout out Heimdall!) Through a mixture of getting some recording sessions from the Days Gone and God of War 2018 teams and with my own foley and Heimdall recordings, I was able to put together the suite of sounds needed for the wolf.
It was definitely a challenge getting the wolf to sound both like a trusting friend but also still have it be a wild animal that could attack you if it felt like it.
Partners in the Hunt
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Partners in the Hunt ◦
Working on the ambience for this game was such a treat! Each biome was so unique that crafting a wind for the Ishikari Plains was so different than crafting one for the Yotei Grasslands or Ishikari Plain. The amount of different activities to do in each of those valleys was also something that kept me on my toes! Breathing life into each of these valleys was one of the most fun things I did on this project.
My favorite things I made for the world were crafting all the sounds for the Spider Lily General mission as well as the horse herd, which was iterated on the most thanks to all the feedback my wife, an experienced equestrian, could stand to offer.
(fun fact - I forgot that a group of horses was called a herd, so I went with what I thought it was called in the moment. In all of the rigging, it is referred to as a flock.)
A World to Experience
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A World to Experience ◦
One of the first things I did coming on to the team here at Sucker Punch was to update the foley system they had for Ghost of Tsushima. I liked it a lot as it was, (it was award winning!) but I wanted to try and push things a little bit more. One thing I updated was creating a speed-based blending system for footsteps, seamlessly blending between different speeds of footsteps as the player increases their speed.
I also upped the amount of assets we would use by a ton! This required us to go to the Playstation foley team, and man, did they deliver. We were able to refactor our entire foley tagging system to rely on three major asset types - Body, Cloth, and Gear - and through our variable controlled foley system, were able to tag up every movement so that it was as if there were foley artists themselves performing the actions as you play the game.