Dev Chat: Ontogeny Audio

Hello, everyone! I'm Byron, the composer and sound designer for Prehistoric Kingdom. If you've read any Dev Diary from the last... too many years, then you'll be very acquainted with my writing by now.

Today, I wanted to give you a quick rundown of our approach to handling audio for animal ontogeny. I've had a long time to think about how we could approach it and I think what we've ended up on is quite elegant.

Keep in mind that the video above is a very early look at the system in action, so there will be further tweaks and adjustments made as development continues.

The Basics

At a basic level, things like breaths, sniffs, footsteps, growls and foley are processed in realtime depending on an animal's age. This means that for younger animals, all their sounds will be pitched up and made quieter with less low-end to cut off any excessive bass frequencies.

This helps save a lot of resources since we don't need to create baby-specific assets for things like breathing or some random action like digging around. It's a great foundation to immediately get things sounding smaller without too much work (beyond setting the maximum pitch per sound!).

Going Baby Mode

When you look at a baby animal, players expect it to make all sorts of adorable squeaks, cries and chitters.

Pitching up the adult noises wouldn't cut it here, so each rig or family group has a set of generic calls and growls specifically for when they're babies. We even have a baby-specific vocal animation to maximize their cuteness!

As they grow, the baby calls become slightly deeper to indicate their growing maturity. We add a raspy adolescent layer to the dinosaurs once they're old enough to give them more grit, too.

In the future we may give some species unique baby calls to separate them from other animals that share a rig, but since babies are supposed to be temporary outside of Sandbox, it's a very low priority.

Growing Up

Entering adolescence, an animal will switch over to the adult vocal animations with more processed sounds.

At this age, the adult calls are pitched up and have a custom EQ curve that carve out many of the "sharp" frequencies in order to leave room for our raspy layer. Their calls will continue to get deeper and deeper as the animal ages, with the adolescent rasp eventually dropping away entirely.

For a mammal, this step can almost be avoided entirely depending on the species since their sounds are typically waaay less designed than the dinosaurs. If you go listen to an adolescent tiger or an elephant online, they really are just pitched up adults. Less work for me, hurray!

Seemingly Seamless

Looking at this audio setup as a whole, you really only have two stages to work on: baby and post-baby.

This distinction allows us to make babies feel special with their unique sounds, whilst ensuring that adolescent animals don't become a massive resource drain thanks to their reliance on manipulating existing assets and layering new ones where needed.

Even though we still need to switch their sounds at some point, it happens early on compared to the rest of their lives. I'm really pleased with this solution and can't wait for you all to properly meet our little goobers once they're finished.

Take care!

- Byron

P.S. the T. rex will be getting new adult sounds in Update 14! You can hear some work in progress versions in the video.

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OntogenyAudioTest_New (Streamable)