Lost Planet

Here is Part 2 of my interview with Sound Director Tomoya Kishi. If you missed Part 1, click HERE.

[Brian] Did you create the sound effects for the Akrid and weapons and all that on your own? Or how is that handled? Can you go over the basic process involved in creating a sound effect?

[Kishi] The main thing I created myself was the sounds you hear when Wayne is walking and running and jumping. Wayne’s footsteps, the sound of his pant legs swishing as he walks or runs, all of the sounds you would hear yourself if you were out there in the snow instead of Wayne.

Click to read the rest of Part 2.

[More:]

[Kishi]We got a brand new sound studio in the development building, so I was able to do the recording here in-house. I’d bring in snow suits, metallic tools, cables, anything that I thought could produce a sound Wayne might make when he does something. I’d put on or use whatever objects and see what kinds of sounds I could get out of them. Like one time I had on a pair of ski boots and was stomping around the studio in them.

I’d take all of these sounds and put them into the game, and tweak them from there to make their sound fit into the game.

Taking footsteps as an example, in a normal game you might have one sound for a footstep, which gets repeated as your character walks. But in Lost Planet, even if you take one step in the game, other parts of the character’s body are moving, so I wanted it to sound real, not just the footsteps. Plus there are different sounds for different surfaces or depths of snow, and multiple patterns or sounds for each individual situation. There are also the footsteps for all of the Akrid and the Vital Suits.

[Brian] I take it jumping from last-gen systems to the Xbox 360 gave you some more freedom in terms of what you could do with the audio.

[Kishi] Yes. The reason I was able to add so many sounds to make the audio so much more realistic lies with the hardware capabilities of the Xbox 360. The 360 can put out about twice the frequencies as the PS2, so I can include crystal-clear sounds in registers that the PS2 couldn’t even play back.

And since the 360’s graphical capabilities meant that we could render Wayne with lots of tiny detail, I had to make sure the sound effects were on par with that.

[Oguro] Once we finished the master version of the game, Kishi-san put together a nice 5.1 setup to play the game in. It was really awesome. Even though I had already played the game to death, once I tried playing it there in full surround sound, I was blown away and ended up spending the whole day just playing there.

There are lots of cases where a better environment, better equipment, reveals the flaws in a game or whatever. But with Lost Planet, the better your setup, the better the game gets.

[Brian] Exactly. I have a pretty decent surround setup at home to compliment my HDTV, and I love cranking up the sound in this game. It’s crazy hearing Akrid coming up behind you, or someone stomping through the snow trying to sneak up behind you online. Or those big explosions going off in the distance in those big multiplayer maps.

Moving on, I know you worked with a place called Soundelux on the game. What was your relationship with them?

[Kishi] Actually Capcom has worked with Soundelux a lot in the past. They have helped out a lot on both the Devil May Cry and Resident Evil series.

When I first joined Capcom, I knew Devil May Cry had some really great sound effects, and that was kind of my goal, to be able to make sound effects on that level. When I found out that it was Soundelux that did a lot of that, I knew I wanted to get a chance to work with them someday.

So when talk about Lost Planet first started coming up, the vision for the game was a big, epic movie-level scale, so I knew we had to bring Soundelux in to help out. I talked to the producer, and he okayed it, and it took off from there.

Besides the sound effects, they also sent over a demo tape of music, and it was really great. So I ended up contracting them for both sound effects and music.

Normally the way Capcom works with Soundelux is to hand it over and let them basically do the whole audio side of the project. But this time around I was the sound director, and in order to help them understand the world of Lost Planet better and get deeper into the game, I put together a bunch of stuff for them to look at and read. I thought this would help them understand what we were aiming for with Lost Planet and make the sound effects that much better. I also drew up a list of the kinds of sounds I needed for the game. As the project went on, the wonderful people at Soundelux got more into Lost Planet. They love the game. So that was really gratifying for me as well.

[Oguro] I read an email from the staff at Soundelux, forwarded to me by Kishi-san. They said it was a true honor to be able to work on Lost Planet. Of course I responded and thanked them, but this was the first time they had been so enthusiastic about one of our games. It’s been really great working with them.

On to Part 3!

—Brian