Unless you’ve been living underneath an Internet-less rock for the past few months, you probably know that Spore, the new game from The Sims creator Will Wright at Maxis, is a pretty epic universe indeed.
Such a massive enviroment calls for some massive sound design. Maxis (and Wright) seemed to put a lot of thought and care into the sound team (headquartered in Emeryville, CA). The sound team consisted of six people (when Spore was published; there had been several more sound team members throughout the five years of the game’s development).
Considering that the creations of Spore are, sometimes, animal like (and always creature like), Kent Jolly, audio director, says that the team used hundreds of animal recordings - from sound libraries to recording trained Hollywood animals used in movies. Jolly and his partner, sound designer Mike Cormier, carried around a couple of Sound Devices 722 recorders, one with a Schoeps M/S setup, the other with a Sennheiser shotgun.
One of the most interesting aspects of the sound design in Spore is the generative music implemented into the actual game by Cliff Martinez and Brian Eno.
On the music inside the game:
“Brian was involved in a lot of general music design with me [Jolly], so he came here and I also went to London and worked in his studio.” … “He’d come with his Mac and Logic and he’d be generating sounds. We sould sample them, get them in as instruments into the game and play with them together.
There are two kinds of generative music in the game. One is sort of MIDI note-based—that happened much more here from samples made by Brian by ourselves. But there’s also a whole area that’s more like Brian’s ambient music, where he made it using software he called ‘Shuffler’ [note: this is, supposedly, Eno's custom-built MaxMSP patch]. The software was based on earilier pieces where he would make 10 CDs and they’d all have a set of tracks, and then he’d set them on ‘random shuffle’ and they’d play randomly and we’d make ambient music that way. We re-created that system in the game, especially in the space game: When you go to a planet, [there's a music] system there that plays a different sample every 10 to 30 seconds, and this group [of samples] has this volume range and this pan setting, and a whole group of those forms one track. You end up wending through these tracks that are changing all the time.”
“Unlike a lot of games, most of it is not looped—it’s being generated in real time. There might be chunks of drum loops that are being re-sequenced randomly, and then all the pads and other sounds are basically MIDI but we’re generating them randomly.”
And, once out of the space universe in the game, you enter into what Jolly calls the “Civ game.” Where your creature/animal can start colonies, cities, etc.
“[In the] Civ game, the user gets some control over the music: You can pick beats—some were made by Brian, some were made by me and my assistant Aaron McLeran, and then reprocessed and changed—and then you can pick a melody instrument and design your own little melody, and also pick up ambience tracks. Using a note editor, you can set the tempo, get rid of notes, change the length of how they play…and there’s an algorithm [built in] that will randomly form melodies.”
The note editor was concieved and built by Jolly, Eno, Wright, and engineer Cyril Saint Girons.
So, as you can see, this kind of sound and music design takes up a lot of resources (”days of stuff on there. It’s more than two gigs of compressed audio”). So what’s the sample rate and bit depth?
“At one point, we thought we might have to go to 22k for all our samples, but in the end we didn’t have to. Some of them are 22k, but morst of the voices are 44[k] MP3 and most of the music is 44[k] MP3.”
“It [the stereo mix] gets multed out to surround, but we did very little in 5.1 for CPU reasons.”
Two gigs of compressed audio? An entire generative music score? Despite all the launch problems [DRM and otherwise], this makes me want to pick the game up.
Oh, and as a last side-note, the DAW of choice in the Maxis offices was Pro Tools for the sound design, and Logic (as stated above) for music.
Quotes taken from the Mix article “The World of Spore,” by Blair Jackson {9/08)
