Question on Game Foley

swordofdestiny·Nov 12, 2014·3 votes·5,336 views

Hello there, I'm swordofdestiny. I'm going to university for Audio Engineering and I hope to work on audio for games at some point. I've always been in awe of the sound design in League and I remember asking a question on what foley went into the making of Gnar (during the Kalista Q & A, I was in class all day [at least I got two hours of mixing in]) and got a really cool response about it from one of the guys on the audio team (I, for the life of me cannot find the post now and I'm annoyed at myself). Anyway, I was wondering (and hopefully I'm allowed to ask this question, read the rules and board guidelines and nothing seems to prohibit this), if you're willing to divulge this, what your general process is when you're designing the foley for new champions? Do you start out with a general idea of how you want it to sound and work backwards trying to figure out what you could do to create that sound?

10 Comments

RiotRiot EnoNov 12, 20142 votes

Is this the question you're referring to?

swordofdestinyNov 12, 20143 votes

Yes, that is indeed the post I was referring to. It was part of the inspiration for my post. I was hoping the foley process could be explained in more detail, if the team is allowed to explain processes like that.

RiotRiot EnoNov 21, 20142 votes

Hey! I meant to reply to this sooner, but I feel like I've been too busy to write a thoughtful, detailed response.

Maybe to help me tailor my reply a bit, I want to clarify that we're on the same page in regards to what the word foley has traditionally meant. For me, foley is the art of performing sound to picture, recording that sound, and editing it in with other sounds. I just wanted to be sure you weren't talking about the entire sound design process, which more often than not is quite a bit more extensive than just foley recording/editing, (although a HUGELY key and integral part!!)

Lemme' know and I'll do my best to give you some useful info. =)

Cheers!

swordofdestinyNov 22, 20142 votes

I think you're right. I am confusing the two. At one point I read this book about Foley from Focal Press (I can't remember the title, just the publisher) and they mentioned how the lightsaber sound was designed, so I think I subconsciously internalized that as being a part of foley.

Basically, my question is, when you guys are designing sound for a character, let's take Gnar for example, what led to the decision to use the bone flutes in conjunction with traditional boomerang whooshes? Or say, what's the process behind figuring out how you want the boomerang to sound and then once you figure out how you want it to sound, what's the process for figuring out how to achieve that sound? Educated trial and error? Is there a specific process to sound design? (I don't mean like assembly line, but say like a process you go through similar to the Software Development Life-Cycle, but in audio form)

I hope I was able to clarify my question a bit, but I feel it might still be a bit too broad. Thank you so much for taking the time to look into my question. You guys are seriously the most approachable development team for anything that I've encountered and that's really cool.

Rafael MerloNov 24, 20142 votes

Man, if you can find the title of this book I'm interested. If you want literature about Audio for Games the three titles I liked most are: -** "Game Sound" by Karen Collins**, The MIT Press. Man, even if you skip the other two go for this one. It's awsome and very suited for the academic discourse you'll need to use in University.

"Creating Music and Sound for Games" by G. W. Childs IV, Thomson Course Technology PTR. So much information about the sound design proccess, from field recording to digital manipulation of databases, including analysis of specific software and apparatus.
"The Complete Guide to Game Audio" by Aaron Marks, Focal Press (Elsevier). The one that cover a section that's missing in most others: the legal contracts, deals and how to get a job. Cheers from Brazil o/

swordofdestinyNov 24, 20141 votes

Literature trade! I will probably pick those up in due time. The one I read about Foley (there's some cool stories in it too, for example the way they made the lightsaber noise in Star Wars was they put a microphone behind a fan (where the air intake is) and overlayed television static) I had to look up my Amazon purchase history, but it's still there. The title is: -"The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation" by Vanessa Theme Ament ISBN: 978-0240811253. It's a great read.

RiotRiot EnoDec 4, 20143 votes

Good grief it's taken me a while to get back to you - so sorry about that! =/

The answer to your question could fill pages upon pages, and would vary greatly between sound designer. One of the most fun/challenging/scary/liberating things about sound design is that there really is no "right" way to go about things. It could start with being in a subway station and hearing a really weird, defective elevator door motor. Maybe that motor sounded like a grumpy, tired robot grumbling about something. So you grab your trusty portable recorder, (Zoom H4n, etc...) record that weird elevator door, and stash it in your personal archives, knowing it'll come in handy some day. Being aware of your surroundings, and listening to all the crazy sounds that most people ignore is a great way to develop an ear for the unique.

As it pertains to designing sounds for new Champs, or anything else in game for that matter, generally the approach is, "How do I sell the flavor, character and emotion of this Champ with a set of sounds that is fiercely unique to them and also allows for the highest level of game play clarity?" No two Champs are the same, nor should their sonic palettes be the same. You should know which Champ you're hearing at any given time, even if you can't see them.

So, how do you do that? We figure it out as we go, every single time; like I said, there is no right answer. It takes experimenting, knowledge of the Champ's back-story, knowing how they'll behave in game, and how players are likely to build them.

Often times too, the area or faction from which a Champ hails will have a direct effect on how that Champ should sound. For example, most Champs from the Shadow Isles all share a common tonality, while maintaining their own unique sound.

Let's keep this conversation going - I'm sure that didn't answer all of your question(s), and I'd be happy to go back and forth on this. =)

swordofdestinyDec 7, 20141 votes

Sorry I took a couple of days on this reply, last week of school, recording project due (lots of last minute mixing work despite having spent 20+ hours mixing the projects >_<), music history projects, you know, everything in university always happens at one time. Oh that and trying to figure out why our Pro Tools installation keeps crashing when loading projects. Some projects load fine and others just crash while restoring tracks and then when you re-open them after force quitting PT10, the Mac Pro restarts. The only workaround I found was to open a backup session of that session, then close the session and reopen the thing. At this point, I think what I'm going to do is uninstall Pro Tools 10 completely, delete it completely out of the applications folder including all of our plugins and then reinstall it. (the only reason I put this here is maybe you guys have run into something similar and might have some insight on what I can do to fix it before we get our Recording Techniques I students in who are going to...push all the buttons and drive me insane having to daily reset the settings on the DM2000. lol [I'm one of the student supervisors of the recording studio at my university. It's a fun gig and I get paid for it.])

Okay, so I might be on the right track already. I was in the recording studio at university, trying to figure out why only one USB port was working on the Mac Pro (yeah, I think it's starting to die and I'm not sure the new Mac Pros have expansion slots that we can plug the HD cards into for the 192s...) and had finished my coffee and happened to poke the top of my empty coffee cup and it made this wonderful popping noise that my brain immediately yelled, "That could be a menu item clicking noise if EQ/'verbed properly!" Unfortunately, someone was mixing at the time and they really didn't understand why I got so randomly excited about a coffee cup, so I still have that empty coffee cup sitting in my car waiting to be recorded properly. So, on that note, I've also experimented with holding damper pedals down on pianos and using them as sort of a reverb plate as well. So, what recorders do would you personally recommend? I know absolutely nothing when it comes to portable recorders outside the old tape based one my dad used to record coyotes howling about 20 years ago and I'm not even sure where that got to because I'd love to digitize that.

Okay, so there isn't a true right answer when it comes to that designing mode. I assume that the design process is mostly done by a small committee of sound designers and the over all sound direction is headed up by Senior Sound Designers like yourself. If I may ask, how does the internal hierarchy work in the sound team?

With the area/faction tonality commonality, I noticed that while the Mecha skins, Project: YASUO and battlecast voice filters weren't what I was expecting. I was kind of expecting more of a robotic voice filter (like throwing it through a vocoder or something more in line with nunu bot/blitzcrank), but I feel like you guys were pulling some inspiration from the Transformers movies. I feel like the way you guys did it was you threw a high pass filter onto a very short delay (I want to say somewhere between 4-10ms) with maybe a little bit of a phaser on that with some heavy, I want to say, plate reverb(that's just my random 2AM guess at how you guys achieved it, I'm sure it's probably a bit more detailed than that or I could be completely wrong). What made you guys go towards that sort of tonality vs a more pronounced robot type voice filter?

Rafael MerloNov 24, 20142 votes

Up because I'm interested too!

Composers and sound designers FORTHEWIN :D

And hey, about my dream of downloading / buying sheet music (mainly orchestral scores) from you? I'm eager to conduct Braum's and Lissandra's Theme with an orchestra and choir .

PhireFrostDec 4, 20142 votes

Hey Riot Eno. I'm a professor of Design (albeit Scenic and Lighting and not Sound) at a University and I just wanted to say I appreciated your response in this post. The philosophy of design is extremely similar to the ones that I see and use in theatre all the time.