footgun: underground

The game is characterized by its large number of different balls with unique properties. It was important to emphasize this uniqueness through characteristic sound design and to give the player the opportunity to locate each individual ball in the stage and identify its type even with their eyes closed. This applies to the bounce and loop sounds as well as the opponent hits. The sounds are also modulated by parameters such as ball speed to indicate the force of the kick.

 

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In a game of this type, the gameplay can quickly become chaotic and cluttered, especially when the number of opponents and balls is high and there are many additional effects. Prioritizing the importance of the sounds in the mix is crucial here to ensure a focus on the essentials at all times. This was implemented using instance limits as well as bus sidechaining for compression and EQ to ensure that essential sounds such as opponent attacks always have enough space in the mix.
 

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Due to the large number of different sounds, it is not possible or even advisable to make every single detail audible at all times. For this reason, a stage-dependent mix was introduced to highlight, suppress or even mute various acoustic elements depending on their importance in the current stage. For example, the foley sounds of the player in stages with opponents have a much lower volume than in the home base to avoid cluttering the mix unnecessarily and to leave room for important sounds such as balls and opponents.

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The music was implemented using a single dynamic event in which the individual pieces of music perform random loops and jumps to ensure variety and avoid monotony. For the boss fights, the music was also divided into sections of varying intensity, which become active depending on the phase of the fight in order to build up the tension and emphasize the introduction of a new mechanic in the boss fight using musical cues. The transitions between the different pieces and boss phases were realized by several parameters such as StageType, GameState and BossPhase.