Rancor Rampage is a great example of sound design and implementation for environments that are almost completely destructible but without any predictable pattern as to how that destruction occurs (i.e. no canned animations, etc).
There were a number of materials in this mode including wood, stone and metal as well as structures of varying shapes and sizes. The idea was to annihilate these structures, often ripping apart / smashing through them via “chunks” as opposed to merely toppling them upon collision and/or sufficient force. With that in mind, we couldn’t use animations for the building destructions since the buildings themselves were made up of separate pieces and each one would come apart in a unique (although similar) way.
From an audio standpoint, this meant having to design sounds and systems that would conform themselves to however the player choose to demolish something. If the player swiped out a single chunk of stone and it landed on sand, the appropriate set of sounds had to be called to create the audio effect. Likewise, if he jumped into a structure made entirely of wood and destroyed all of it at once, a different but equally appropriate set of sounds had to be called.
We met with the programmers and designers to learn how the game code would work. A system was developed that would be primarily based on tracking the size of these chunks and made dozens of assets with dozens of variations for the available material types and sizes of each. Small, medium and large stone breaks and wood scatters, for example. Then, as code tracked the different properties of chunks, the corresponding audio assets would be called.
In terms of sound design, I created a number of the physics elements described above, UI SFX, edited lots and lots of dialog and created some sounds for the Rancors themselves. One of my favorite moments is when any of the Rancors picks up a person and eats them – the chuffing, biting and vocal noises were made when I went into the foley room one Saturday morning armed with a bag of baby carrots, a digital recorder and what turned out to be a serendipitous head cold. I must say I enjoy knowing thousands of people around the world have had a blast rampaging around the Star Wars universe whilst listening to the sound of my pitched down phlegm noises and carrot eating.
Many of the UI sounds were made using granular synthesis to stretch out abstract sci-fi samples and manipulate the resulting grains; distorting them, shuffling them, using delay units and the like until I had nice layers that I could put atop fast arpeggiated melodies to suggest success, failure, powerups, etc.
Below is an audio sample of some of these sounds including a few of the Rancor vocalizations, stone breakables and UI mentioned above.
You can visit the soundcloud page here.
And here is a roughly one minute video showing the work described above:
