The audio in Nightingale has been a challenge from both a technical and creative standpoint. I was brought onto the project in early 2020, and helped design, prototype and develop many audio systems which are integral to Nightingale's soundscape.
Ambience
Nightingale features procedural worlds consisting of different biomes such as forests, deserts and swamps. Each realm has a day/night cycle, a dynamic weather system, points of interest such as caves, ruins and settlements, water bodies such as lakes, rivers, waterfalls and coastline, and various wildlife.
This created many challenges and opportunies for ambience. I led the development of an ambience system which gathers data from the world around the player to create a fully reactive and dynamic soundscape.
Features include:
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A tree density calculator to affect the ambience in dense forests vs open areas.
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Dynamic weather such as rain, hail, wind and thunderstorms.
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3D one-shots such as birds and insects scattered around areas of foliage to avoid repetitive loops.
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A 'mood calculator' which measures elements like fog, cloud cover and season which is then reflected in the ambience.
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An interior ambience system which seemlessly shifts the ambience for interior spaces like caves and buildings, while also providing different reverb sizes and materials.
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Water body detection for rivers, lakes and coastline.
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Distant creature calls with accurate positioning to help with hunting.
Nightingale has a feature called 'Realm Cards' which enable the player to influence the world around them via a special machine. These changes can affect gameplay, but also have visual and audio changes.
An example is the Industry card, which boosts the players blacksmithing abilities. This card also changes the look of the realm from a potentially bright and sunny day to a smoggy and gloomy one. The 'Mood Calculator' will detect these changes and alter the ambience accordingly.
Guns
Another area of audio I led was the guns. Nightingale features a range of pistols, rifles and shotguns based on historical firearms from around the turn of the 20th century. While we weren't able to record our own guns, we obtained some great source from BOOM and The Recordist.
One of the main things I kept in mind with my approach to the gun audio was the environment. Nightingale features forests, hills, canyons, caves and buildings, and gun shots will sound different in each of these locations, thanks to environment scanning and volume placement. You can see examples of this in my showreel.
Magic
Nightingale features many different kinds of magic. We worked closely with the lore designers to create distinct audio palettes for each faction e.g. Human, Fae, Druid.
I helped design and implement audio for player spells, Fae puzzles, traps, and magical creatures.
Tree Felling
Chopping down trees to gather wood is an activity the player does frequently in Nightingale, so it was important to make this mechanic feel satisfying and realistic. The audio proved a challenge as the trees in Nightingale are physics-driven.
We carried out a recording session in an area of woodland where we were able to drop tree trunks and branches from cranes, split logs and rip off branches. With this amount of source I was able to cover tree falls of different sizes and types such as coniferous, deciduous and dead trees.
Each stage of a tree falling in-game was implemented as a separate sound event, from the initial trunk splitting, then creaking, to the impact of the branches which was triggered by collision volumes attached to the tree. We achieved a level of detail including whether the tree had leaves or not based on the season.
