In-Game Cinematics, or IGC's, are where I spent most of my time throughout the game. I was responsible for tagging every footstep, every hand pat, every slight movement of every single IGC in the game.
I collaborated heavily with the sound designer in charge of IGC's and worked with outsourced sound designers to make sure every IGC sounded just right. I tagged surface-specific foley tags with a focus on attention to detail, so even if the character has one foot on carpet and the other foot on cement, it's going to sound like it. In doing this, I was helping with the recording of foley source, creation of metadata, and final implementation of sounds and their rough mix into the game.
In-Game Cinematics
◦
In-Game Cinematics ◦
Systemic Foley is essentially every movement any player character or NPC makes that is not within an IGC or a cinematic. My job's main duty was to go through every single systemic animation in the game to tag Foley with extreme attention to detail. Every hop, every death, every movement from prone to sprinting was meticulously reviewed time and again to make sure it was just right.
Tagging systemic Foley also involved quite a bit of study. I was also in charge of tagging every animal in the game, and Dogs and Horses have different gaits of movement with different syncopation to their footsteps.
I tried my best to make sure every enemy or ally had their own sonic tempo to make them easier to identify. Different Foley tags also emphasize the tension that comes with certain situations; every infected has different means of attacking you, and those movements can be terrifyingly erratic.
Needless to say, if you hear a Bloater's charging, pounding footsteps - you better start running.
Systemic Foley
◦
Systemic Foley ◦
I was tasked with going through the levels and building up different regions that matched the shape of the area, whether it was indoor, outdoor, or a mixture of the two. Deciding how those areas sounded, the type of reflectivity they each had, and deciding how they would blend together if near an open door or a window were more facets of building up these regions, and sometimes these decisions were tricky.
In the video above, I briefly explore a half-sunken mall in a raining Seattle. I walk over a now exterior part of the mall, go inside a store away from the rain, down an escalator to the first floor which is further away from the rain, and finally arrive underneath the collapsed glass roof of the mall. This half-collapsed roof has windows that are constantly being drizzled on by the rain, causing a pitter-patter on the panes.
In situations like these, the glass is often breakable.
To deal with these types of situations, dynamic emitters are placed to create the pitter-patter of the rain. When the glass is broken, the emitter turns off, taking away the sound of the drops hitting the glass, and a blend is turned on, allowing the exterior sound of the rain to bleed through. Identifying these situations and creating these emitters was another task I was sometimes assigned, and the result really adds to the immersion of the player in the game's soundscape.