TONY PORTER - AUDIO DEVELOPER
  • About
  • Sound Design
    • Audio Integration
  • Voice
  • Music
  • Credits
    • Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron
    • 007: James Bond
    • Call of Duty
    • Nascar Unleashed
    • Great Big War Game
    • Skylanders
    • Roller Coaster Tycoon 3DS
    • Sword Coast Legends
    • Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars
    • Heroes Of Ruin
    • Alone In The Dark
    • Hot Wheels: The Worlds Best Driver: The Video Game
    • Tron
  • Contact
  • Game Audio Slack
  • Resume
My greatest achievement so far, I was fortunate to be the audio director for Sword Coast Legends. As the sole audio developer I was responsible for...well...everything! Sound Effects, Music implementation, Dialog Management. That's hundreds and thousands of spells, combat, environmental sfx, etc. SCL features a dynamic music system that matches intensity and "tide" in real time that I developed with Inon Zur (our composer!). The game is also fully-voiced both in the story and in combat using systems I created just for SCL using Wwise. I even voiced a handful of characters including the cover demon, Belaphoss. A single paragraph won't cover everything I did, nor can it account for all the support from n-Space I had to make the world of audio I've always wanted to make. I'll try and break down the big categories here.
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Sound Design

Scores of enemy types, each with movement sounds, ability and spell sounds, VO or vocalizations had to be designed from the ground up. Weapons were grouped using the typical D&D damage type model (slashing, piercing, etc), and each type had a different whoosh, impact and flourish to help differentiate. Perhaps the trickiest was managing the hundreds of magical spells, projectiles, and impacts. Given the size of some battles it was like mixing fireworks live, and this was possible by understanding their uses at the design level. What might overlap what? What gets priority over what? And then all the world ambiences? What? A multitude of dungeon types and overworld terrain was my canvas for designing the sonic landscape. There's a decent amount of travel and you're not running from battle to battle all of the time. Environments would usually be a mix of 2D and 3D assets registered in Unity, powered by Wwise, Also utilized some of BOOM's Medieval Library, Dehumanizer, Various Sample Logic libs, edited in Sound Forge and assembled in Vegas.

​Yup, Vegas.

Music Design

I was just going to write the name "Inon Zur" and leave it at that, but I figure I would expand a bit. 
Inon was fantastic to work with. A composer with not only years of experience and knowledge to draw from, but one that can both draw and instill inspiration and energy into any track or request. We didn't make it easy for Inon with the many revisions we needed on some of the stronger themes in the game, but we all felt the time was worth it to get it RIGHT. 
Outside of the compositions, Inon and I devised a system for dynamic music. We wanted something that could be used over and over without fatiguing the player. This would be doubly important in multiplayer as the game features a LIVE DM that can spawn monsters, traps, or other obstacles in the party's way at any time. Battles could scale at a moments notice, or just be a single one-off from a wandering mercenary. So we introduced a real-time value that was based off the rank or perceived threat the player incurs that would drive both the music's content and energy. As battle scale higher, you'll hear more parts of the orchestra piping in. As you gain the edge in battle, the music transitions to a more triumphant scheme. This ended up working very for SCL. It's not an over-the-head implementation, most players won't notice the transitions as everything should feel natural.
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The devil is in the details...

Voice System

Thousands and thousands of lines of dialog! Branching dialog, combat barks, context sensitive selection VO. A great cast, of which I got to join. One of the things that Dan Tudge reminded us as we were listening to auditions was that we needed to keep a wide range of voice types to really stamp down the character among all the others. Each voice would have a color and we should cast for that color to help differentiate but to complete the spectrum of characters we'd need. I think we did a great job with the casting. The actors seemed to really fit their counterparts with ease. It took a few of us to wrangle, manage and syphon all the VO into the game but I had great managers and champions of narrative to really make it one of the highlights of the game.
With Wwise, I was able to create a universal combat bark system that allowed each character to react to things in the world in their own special way. For instance, each character would have a large pool of things to say regarding looting a corpse, finding gold, coming under attack, being resurrected, performing a large spell, picking a lock or just being clicked on. We then gave the user sliders that would not only affect the volume of each quip, but the rate at which we heard them. If you got tired of them, you can zero out the probability entirely of some categories.
There really wasn't an alternative to using Wwise. This would be my 8th commercial title using Wwise and I'm starting to get real good with it. Wwise allowed me to do a lot of complex bussing and routing to get everything to behave the way it needed. Using the invaluable "switch" system we were able to change from terrain sounds for footsteps to armor types worn by players and enemies, the above mentioned combat barks. Also included a dynamic weather system that the DM could dial in by both environmental values like snow, rain, temperature, to time of day... all affecting the audio output. I also mentioned the combat system above as being designed with scaleability in mind. Combat music wouldn't even be triggered if the threat value was below a certain threshold cause that would be annoying to hear pop up everytime you dispatch a single wolf, right?
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  • About
  • Sound Design
    • Audio Integration
  • Voice
  • Music
  • Credits
    • Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron
    • 007: James Bond
    • Call of Duty
    • Nascar Unleashed
    • Great Big War Game
    • Skylanders
    • Roller Coaster Tycoon 3DS
    • Sword Coast Legends
    • Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars
    • Heroes Of Ruin
    • Alone In The Dark
    • Hot Wheels: The Worlds Best Driver: The Video Game
    • Tron
  • Contact
  • Game Audio Slack
  • Resume