Back to search

Running around a big ship can be exciting, especially when running into dark or shady corners. How do you make these kinds of areas feel like rusty, creepy little places?

TL;DRThey get a creepy feel by walking the ship repeatedly and iterating, placing ambient audio triggers in corners and centres, pitching sounds differently in darker spots, and implying unseen things behind walls.

Josh BellSound Designer

Yeah, we just spend a lot of time in the level, getting a feel for it, and thinking about what the player should feel when they're in those kinds of environments. I guess it's just a lot of... I don't want to say trial and error, but it kind of is. You try something out and then go through the whole process of walking around the ship and going from one place to another and seeing if that feels right.

Phil Peers-SmallwoodLead Sound Designer

There's a basic concept for, say, a space, a room, a corridor, Josh. You would dress each corner with an audio trigger spot and then have one in the centre, or an audio area ambience. So it's got a bed ambience and then each corner with sound slightly different. And based on the aesthetic, the way it looks... say you even support the same sound in each corner, right? But this side's darker. You can pitch it down a little bit and just guide the player's subconscious on this kind of journey going, hey, there's something cool over here. We'll have something trigger every 10 seconds or something. What's really cool about ambience is you can imply stuff that's behind the walls that you can't see. So if you're walking down this corridor... corridors, Josh... and there's pipes and stuff like that, you can just allude to stuff being on the other side. If it's habitation, someone having an argument in the hab next door to you and stuff like that.

Star Citizen Live›Audio - Design & Programming·
Published on this date.8 Nov 2019