Why Game Audio is Vital in ‘Through The Woods’ from Antagonist:

The announcement trailer for Through The Woods

Hi Dan, please introduce yourselves and Through The Woods:

Hello! I’m Dan Wakefield, the sound designer / composer / marketer man at Antagonist. Thanks for having me!
To give you a bit of background, Antagonist is a small indie game studio based in Oslo. We’re seven full time staff and have been in business for around 18 months and Through the Woods is our first commercial title.
The box blurb of Through the Woods is as follows:
Through the Woods is a third-person psychological horror experience about how far a mother would go to save her son. Through dynamic narration you follow the mother’s re-telling of the events surrounding her son’s disappearance in a setting heavily inspired by Norse mythology and classic Japanese horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The interrogation that covers the mother’s tale is never seen, only heard, as the actions unfolding on the screen have already happened.

We usually say it’s Alan Wake meets Gone Home with a twist of Amnesia

You control the past, shaping the story of the present. When trying to quickly explain the game to someone, we usually say it’s Alan Wake meets Gone Home with a twist of Amnesia.
 

How far along in the development process are you?

We started production in January 2014 as part of a final Bachelor thesis for most of the team, but working fulltime on the game since June 2014 now for about a year. What we created as part of the thesis had to mostly be redone as we found better ways to approach the design, and our first prototype was basically scrapped. The concept was still the same, but enemies, behaviour and layout of levels has been redone. Game development is a place where you often struggle to see the gold before late in development, but over the past five months the game has seen huge improvements in almost all areas. Especially upping the level of polished graphics after hiring a new artist, but maybe even more so when we got the professional voice-over recordings in the game, it feels almost like night and day. We now have a really nice vertical slice of the game that we’ve shown off at GDC Play and other smaller expos to great effect.
 

In the game presentation, you mention that the audio design is a core mechanic. Why did you decide that sound should be a key focus for this project?

Since we decided to make a survival horror title and the game is set in a forest, a strong showing from the audio side was decided very early on in development. The forest is dark and the sound helps you identify threats and decide the best way to proceed.

You can hear beetles crawling through dead leaves, there are disembodied noises all around and you can almost sense things you know aren’t really there
 

If you’ve ever been in a forest at night, you probably know how mysterious and frightening it can be, if you choose to think about it that way. The sounds in there!
You can hear beetles crawling through dead leaves, there are disembodied noises all around and you can almost sense things you know aren’t really there. It’s very easy to scare yourself and let your own paranoia take hold.
There’s also something very special about the forests in Norway. They are so beautiful, but also melancholy somehow. The woods feel so alive, you can understand why the Scandinavians of the past made up stories about the creatures that inhabited them from the giant trolls to the mischievous tusse and the water-dwelling nøkken.
Also, because there are so many moving parts in a forest, often good audio can do some of the heavy lifting where it comes to giving the illusion of foliage density.
 

How is sound used in the game? And what sound elements are you using to guide the player?

The way the mechanic works is with what I’m starting to call our night blindness/sound focus system. You do have a flashlight in the game, and you are welcome to use it. By using it you are able to see very well but in only one direction and only where your flashlight beam is pointing. The area around the cone of the torch goes very dark and it feels quite claustrophobic.
However, there are things in the woods. They watch you from the darkness as you walk along, not all of them are friendly and some of them are attracted in your direction when they they see your flashlight.
Each creature has its own unique sounds and also its own individual theme music, and at first the game will be a little bit ‘trial and death’. Some creatures will simply chase you out of their territory, some will hunt you and kill you, meaning you have to hide from them in bushes to sneak past them, and some will act aggressively at first but fear the brightness of the flashlight.
Once you know how the creatures behave and learn which sounds come from which, you will have all the information you need in order to proceed.
 

How are you implementing the audio, on a technical level?

At the moment we are using Fabric to implement all the audio. I did have grand ambitions to do all the audio implementation as well as the music and sound design, and I even took an expensive course in Wwise development and such, but as time goes by I’m realising I simply don’t have the coding know-how to implement all this stuff myself. Integrating Wwise with Unity was not an easy thing for me to figure out, but I still plan to learn more about the whole process when I can find the time. Hopefully I can help out with implementation in a future game.
I work in Nuendo most of the time, where I record and mix a lot of the audio. I’ve been building up my little recording studio since I was 15 when I inherited some big old Fostex mixers and two 8-track tape recorders, and have been recording artists professionally since 2008, so I’m very comfortable in Nuendo. I’ve also found the Wwise Profiler incredibly useful to trigger different sounds together to get a better idea of the mix and levels. I don’t know if this is standard practice, but I keep a Wwise projects up to date with most of the sounds I make for the game so I can easily test different sounds together in an easy and tidy way.
I usually end up sitting with our lovely programmer, Torstein, every few weeks to mix the current state of the game. So I will tell him to turn things up or down and we’ll fiddle with it together until I’m happy.
 

What’s been the biggest challenge with the audio so far? And what audio feature are you most happy about?

Easily the biggest challenge so far for me personally is creating the creature sounds without resorting to sound libraries or falling into cliché. I decided early on I would really love to record all the audio myself, so have been out in the wilderness recording ambiences, bushes, footsteps and such with portable recorders. But the creatures are a different story.

The sounds are as real and unembellished as I could make them, to make you feel like you are actually there in the woods

With the sound design of the game, I have been mostly going for absolute realism, so there’s almost no stylisation where the sound design is concerned. The sounds are as real and unembellished as I could make them, to make you feel like you are actually there in the woods.
I’m recording the creature audio in my studio, and so far have been using my own voice for everything. I didn’t know I would be able to do it until I tried it! So far we have several creatures done, including a very classic Norwegian forest beast. Everyone tells me it’s very scary, so that’s great. But I think there will come a time when I have exhausted the range of vocalisations I can make, at which point I will have to decide what to do. When you live in Norway (or anywhere, really) there is not much chance of finding crocodiles, lions or hyenas to record and manipulate, so I may have to either get very creative, or else use some of the very fine sound libraries available out there.
I have no problem using sound libraries, just so that’s clear. I simply like to record as much as I can myself.
 

How can people support your project? And what are the next steps, in case you successfully complete the Kickstarter campaign?

If anyone wants to support the project, and, by proxy, seven hard working game developers, the best way at the moment would be to check out our Kickstarter and see if it’s something you’d be interested in supporting.
If people think that our project sounds interesting, then please follow our progress on Facebook and twitter. We want to keep an open process about our development, and when we’re not busy with a Kickstarter we try to blog frequently on our website.

I will be venturing out into the night again to collect more sounds for meadows, marshes, mountains.

If our Kickstarter is successful, the first step will be to celebrate with a friendly pat on the back for each of the team, possibly followed by a well-deserved night out, and then a good nights sleep finally. Our next steps are to crack on with the layout of the next stages of the game, recording a lot of dialogue and motion capture and, of course, I will be venturing out into the night again to collect more sounds for meadows, marshes, mountains. It’s fun to be a game developer!

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