When making a new ship, how do you identify what that ship should sound like?asked by ReallyTinyRick

It's a simple question, but it's got a lot of complicated answers to it. It depends on the manufacturer, the size of the vehicle, the form, the shape, the materials it's been built with, and also the thrusters, and then how fast it's going to go, what its requirement is within the game, and what it's going to do. That's an overview, and the most important thing is any sounds we give it, we want it to actually feel like it's coming from the incredible design of the ship. So that's the kind of headline. And if we dig into that further...

Yeah, I can add to that. Generally, the process is we'll have a team-wide kickoff, which will involve other departments. Usually we'll get a little summary, maybe a few sentences on what the ship's all about. And we'll usually take that, do a little more digging, have a look at the ship. What manufacturer is it? Is it Drake? Is it a little bit more rundown? Is it Origin? Super high tech? Then we'll gather our own references from popular media, discuss it amongst ourselves, get a kickoff from Simon, and that usually gives us a pretty good start and where we want to go with it.

Yeah, Simon comes in and makes some silly noises.

We'll look at all contemporary vehicles, real ones and fantasy ones, and then we'll all get together. I will generally make a lot of noises with my mouth or get very excited about maybe a dragster I might have seen online, or we might draw from any number of sound ideas that we've heard or experienced that we might want to bring to the ship. Recently we've been giving each ship a unique identity, so it's got its own signature, if you like, and you can identify it. So rather than just digging from a pool of sounds and just throwing those in, each ship needs its own considerations. The design of them is beautiful and we want to reflect all of the time going into the design with the sound design. We could draw our sources from any number of things. The ideal scenario is that we create the sounds ourselves now. We'll dig into this further, obviously, but realistically we don't have jet engines parked outside that we can go and record, so we've got to come up with interesting possibilities, and out of that we may record very unusual objects in different ways in order to get them into the game, into the vehicle.