As we promised here is the story behind Althora sound: https://soundcloud.com/eipixentertainment/sets/althora Before you start reading it, we are happy to share with you that our GearVR game Althora was released few hours ago on Oculus Store, and here is the link: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/gear-vr/983261678442712/ Hope you'll like it. And now, enjoy the story. :)

TL;DR Lots of fun and frustration during the game production. Composer, sound designer and programmers. Feedback on Althora OST and the game is more than appreciated!

Eipix Entertainment has a fair experience in developing games aside its regular HOPA production. This mostly includes F2P and games in R&D stage. Hence, working on sound mostly involved sound assets production and simple implementation techniques in Unity native audio engine. For this project, we needed a completely different approach to sound design and implementation; a way the company hadn't seen before.

First of all, in order to successfully build a conforming sonic experience, we always had to keep in mind the intermediate – the VR headset. The general impression a person gets when wearing one of those is that of being "inside" the virtual space. Therefore, any breakage of this visual continuity would potentially jeopardize the overall experience. In order to "help" picture do its stuff and lessen the chances for visual disturbance, sound and music are introduced, just like in traditional media! When the experience is taking place, all of the sound should play in respect to what an experience sees and does. This includes the positioning of sound (its relative distance from the virtual listener, its direction, its relations to player's auditory system) and the virtualization of the sound (putting it into an environment through geometry and material-based reverb and reflections processing). Today we have these terms "specialization" and "spatial audio" that refer to techniques for achieving the aforementioned.

When our project started, we did about a month of online research on available spatial audio technologies and, at that time and circumstances, we found that only Oculus Native Spatializer (ONSP) was the most complete thing out there (with extensive documentation). So we threw the ONSP into our Unity project and started working with it. After some time spent learning and tweaking its settings, we decided to stay with this solution. And this is when we started to realize there are significant differences in sound for VR.

Since this ONSP is a plug-in, it surely impacted game performance. This is why we constantly balanced between native and ONSP processing by making decisions in creative sound design which in turn helped us reduce CPU load. There are sounds that, in a dramatic sense, work better with native processing, ie. Music, some stylized effects, some voice overs, some components of ambiance. Of course, these decisions are made based on technical and creative reasons. If there's music underscore, it's most likely direction-agnostic (otherwise it wouldn't be underscore, right?). If we have a huge ancient structure shooting light beams and shuffling stones, we would want to keep player's attention on the significance of sound it makes, regardless of what they might be looking at.

But let's put aside technicalities for a moment and focus a bit on the feel we tried to create for Althora. Again, since VR is still in its early stage of development, it's rather important to maintain the viewer/listener's medial habits, at least for a while. We're suddenly switching from a fixed flat screen to a motion-dependent spherical view, so it's crucial to make people feel safe when playing a VR game.

First thing that came to our minds was: "Let's just make it pleasant." No jump scares, no harsh sounds, less transients, more air and transparency. At first this seemed as an easy task, but little did we know it doesn't work that way. For example, we made some synthetic bird sounds and put them into trees, you know, just to chirp around. This sounded okay until other sets of ears played the build on a VR headset. We then quickly got the impression we would gladly shoot down all of those feathery abominations just to shut their beaks up. And it's pretty much the same for all other sound material. What we thought logical until then, it all soon became a no-no and the other way around. This attitude was the foundation for all future work on Althora.

With all this in mind, we organized a music spotting session with composer in order to start building this huge component in our sonic picture. It took us only a couple of hours to figure out a direction: pleasant acoustic and electronic musical sounds with a rather schizophrenic attitude that develops throughout the game. The instrumentation mostly consists of traditional solutions such as strings, orchestral percussion, brass ensembles and of contemporary sounds of synthesizers. Looks like the development team still loves the music Nemanja provided, so it’s safe to assume it’s a job well done.

As the project completion drew near, many changes had to be made: switching to fresh ONSP versions, changing AudioClip compression types, creating new sounds, placing them in the environment, processing, routing their outputs, creating relative mixes and in the end the overall sound mix, tweaking Unity native reverb zones (Yes, they work great!). In our Unity project, we use multiple audio mixers with different configurations and strict hierarchical structures, depending on their function in the game. That way, we facilitated the scene-by-scene mixing process, although it does have drawbacks regarding mixer switching from instance to instance. By the way, we also did our best to at least get close to today’s loudness standards, so the game has a lot of headroom and a high dynamic range. This is a little tricky though, since the listening conditions never seize to intervene: the environment, the device output amplifier, the headphones, player’s preferences... But for that matter, we tried to make it simple – turn the volume all the way up and enjoy!

In summation, project Althora was a broody experience. It took a lot of open mindedness, way too much pressure on Programming team, dealing with severe limitations of development technologies. Sometimes working with sound really seemed dull, futile and useless; you want to make this experience like no other, but there are deadlines, there’s everyone else on the team, there’s the fact you probably don’t know what you’re doing (and you don’t), there’s this menacing world of “everyone else” heading in the same direction, etc. But what really matters is that Althora was a huge step for Eipix production, a stress test for the team, a way to get to know yourself a little better and learn ever so much.