作者：dren mcdonald

赶在育碧正式停止《幽灵行动：指挥官》的运营之前，我于上周截取了该游戏的一些视频捕捉内容。在这一过程中我想到了自己在开发这款游戏时所遇到的种种音频问题以及相关解决方法。我还发现，《幽灵行动：指挥官》停止运营那天的一年前，刚好就是我开始在Loot Drop担任音频总监的那天。所以我将在此回顾我们创造这款游戏音频的全过程。

Ghost Recon Commander（from hdwallpapers）

面向Facebook的玩家游戏

这是《幽灵行动：指挥官》在最初公开时所设定的市场营销标语，不论好坏，它都概括了我在这一项目中所面对的第一个音频难题。不过一开始我打算先介绍下背景。

Loot Drop是由John Romero, Brenda Romero和Tom Hall共同创建的，而之前我曾与John和Brenda在Lolapps工作室共同致力于《Ravenwood Fair》的开发。在当时看来（2010年），《Ravenwood Fair》是一款典型的Facebook游戏，其设计目的是面向更广泛的用户（与那时的《FrontierVille》或《FarmVille》一样）。在John和Brenda离开并创建Loot Drop时，我仍致力于《Ravenwood Fair》，同时也参与了像《Idle Worship》，《Ravenskye City》，《Zoo World 2》以及《Ravenshire Castle》等Facebook游戏的制作。所以不用说，我非常了解Facebook游戏玩家。

面向Facebook游戏玩家开发游戏的第一个规则便是“不要添加任何可能阻止玩家玩游戏的内容！”从音频角度来看，这话便意味着，声音应该较为柔和（不要咄咄逼人），不要太过真实（通常情况下），绝对不能让玩家感到刺耳（我便会避免声音在1.5k至3k范围内循环）。对于这类型游戏，我们总想创造一些较为轻快的音乐。曾经便有一些游戏测试者表示玩家在打开一款Facebook游戏时，如果听到的是一个烦人的声音，他们便会立刻关掉游戏！不过也有许多测试者表示他们在听到烦人的声音时只会关掉音频。

带着这些经验，我希望加入Loot Drop，并开始《幽灵行动：指挥官》的创造。在这款游戏中，玩家随时都处在危险中，而游戏音效不仅具有现实性，侵略性，重复性，同时还有许多让玩家感到刺耳的声音（如枪声，爆炸声，以及获得战利品等声音）。而这并不符合我心中有关Facebook音频创造的规则，反而更倾向于几年前的游戏音频。

《幽灵行动》的音频

Ghost Recon（from buyonlinegames）

所以说我们现在是在创造一款带有枪声和爆炸声的游戏。没有带着大头的可爱森林动物。如果枪声和爆炸声属于音景范围内（不会吓跑玩家），那么所有Facebook游戏便可以设置任意音波了（这也是我之前所反感的）。但说实话，这仍是一款Facebook游戏，我们不能按照《死亡空间》的方法去创造游戏，并呈现出会让玩家感到紧张的音频。我仍觉得一些非玩家类型也有可能尝试这款游戏，所以我不希望他们被游戏音频给吓到。当了解到John和Brenda之所以如此重视这款游戏是因为他们十分喜欢最初的《幽灵行动》（大约发行于2001年），我便决定去研究这款游戏的音频设置。

如果你玩过最初的《幽灵行动》，你便会清楚它所呈现出的可怕且孤立的体验是怎样的。而音频在此更是扮演着非常重要的角色，因为其中并未包含任何有关游戏玩法的音乐，所以所有感觉都是氛围所营造出来的。在3D空间中，玩家可以在敌人逼近时通过声音辨别出他们的位置。但是《幽灵行动：指挥官》既不是基于3D空间，也并非第一人称游戏。它呈现出的是一个等距空间，游戏视角与即时策略游戏类似。所以第一人称音频设置方法在此并不适用，也不能用于Flash中（更别说我们还必须保持较小的游戏轨迹）。

我从2001年的《幽灵行动》学到的一点便是利用氛围和声响所带来的心理影响去创造并完善音效。在2001年的《幽灵行动》中，当玩家深陷于某一行动中并听不到任何声响时，他便会开始想自己是不是犯了什么错。通常情况下当玩家看不到枪弹是从何处射来时他也会产生这种想法。如此看来，这种方法能够将Facebook游戏音频与硬核游戏体验巧妙地结合在一起。

Brenda的过滤

我们知道，《幽灵行动：指挥官》与《幽灵行动：未来战士》（主机版本）是同时间发行。所以我们便能使用育碧所提供的《未来战士》的声音资产（但几乎没有任何音乐资源）。我认为这就像在极初期临时插入一个短循环。虽然这并不能为我指明方向，但是面对一个熟悉的IP至少会让我较为舒坦。

在极初期时，我们花了大量时间在运行游戏的基础内容，所以我便决定开始编写音乐。Brenda是游戏的设计师，我所写的音乐中有些部分是她所喜欢的，但同时也有些特别元素让她感到别扭，而我必须记录下这些内容。在经过几次的交流后，我便将所有内容拼凑在一起，让她明确地指出哪部分是自己所不喜欢的。通过了解游戏设计师对于游戏音乐的看法以及我自己的试听体验，我便能够更好地构思接下来的游戏音乐。

通常情况下，呈现出一个简单的音乐氛围，并留给玩家更多空间总比使用各种可怕的声音填满游戏强多了。有时候我会想，作为作曲家，如果我们不能明确自己想传达的内容，那只会不断地浪费各种灵感，直到游戏空间被各种声音所填满。这时候你才会意识到自己搞砸了一切。有时候，编曲只是从我们的意识心态中剥落一些不必要的想法，并将其搅合在一起。

音乐和氛围

关于在Facebook游戏中设置音乐的一个鲜为人知的事实是，MP3格式的音乐并不适用于swf格式的游戏。你可以在服务器上放置一些有价值的音频文件，并等待最佳时机让它们真正进入游戏中。这些音乐的播放并不会对游戏玩法产生任何影响。游戏将照常开始，当循环进行缓冲时，音乐便会响起。我与John就音乐设置方面进行了深刻的讨论，从而让我们能够在每个关卡和每张地图上设置不同的音乐。除此之外，我们也可以为所有的游戏领域创造循环氛围，以防止玩家不想听到音乐的情况出现。因为每个关卡和每张地图都拥有不同的循环，所以我们也不需要对文件内容进行压缩。

关于《幽灵行动：指挥官》的音乐和氛围有一点值得注意的是，当玩家选择听音乐时，音乐声带将会把氛围整合进文件中。这是John，Brenda以及我在参考了2001年的《幽灵行动》所做出的决定。一开始我们先将氛围整合到建造关卡中，并且未设置任何音乐，并因此去观察整体的感觉。最后我们发现玩家喜欢的是接近于当前射击游戏的体验，即游戏默认地包含了音乐，但同时我们也希望能让玩家感受到氛围（就像最初的游戏那样）。所以将音乐与氛围整合在一起便是最佳选择，而如果玩家不想听到音乐，他们也能够选择只感受到氛围。

在玩最初的《幽灵行动》与《幽灵行动：指挥官》时，我深刻意识到了高科技武器/通信/战术与最初的丛林/湖水/岩石/木头等的鲜明对比。所以我也在音乐中尝试了这种理念，即明确突出了一些经由技术加工的乐器音效（如电子鼓，音效设计循环或琵琶合成音等）与最初的乐器演奏（如鼓，大提琴或圆号等）间的对比。我认为每个关卡都必须具有一些在音乐上有所区别的元素。

在第一个关卡的音乐中，我设置了技术音效循环，并适当地放慢了速度，而使用这种循环其实也是在规划其它关卡中的音乐。在每首曲子中都有一些“技术循环”，这是我们从最初的《幽灵行动》中所学到的，即以此提醒玩家这种技术始终都是“站在他们那一方”。玩家将能在第十个关卡的最后一首音乐（即玩家进入了“Rivera宫殿”并追逐着最大的boss）中再次听到第一个关卡中的“技术循环”。但是在最后的关卡中，循环是用于不同类型的音乐中。我尝试着在不同关卡的音乐中创造戏剧弧，即一开始先出现某些中立性音乐，随后不断趋于悲伤，阴暗，且更具侵略性，而到了最后一个关卡，玩家将听到更加快节奏的音乐。

声音设计

就像我之前所提到的，我们拥有Red Storm/育碧所提供的大多数武器音效资产。尽管这款游戏对于音频的要求并不大，但我仍认为有必要确保设计音效的多样化。在Loot Drop中，我们拥有一个受数据驱动的系统，我也通过与工程师合作去找出将声音变量整合进数据中的方法。所以我可以装载一个新的声音格式，输入新的数据，并听看看所有声音是否能在最佳时机响起。尽管我并未明确限制音频轨迹，但是我仍希望确保所有声音设置都是合理的，所以我为每个武器设置了3种射击变量，并且这些变量都是随机的。因为在游戏中，弹药就等同于货币，所以我们始终确保射击频率保持在最小值，从而让玩家能够继续游戏（如果玩家用光了弹药，他便需要花现金去购买更多弹药，或等待游戏为他添加弹药）。所以我才会选择3种射击变量。最终，游戏共设置了20至25种不同的武器，并且每种武器拥有3种射击变量。同时还需要注意的是，游戏中还设有有许多对话。

配音

大多数对话都是幽灵之间的通信，包括去哪里，去哪块领域，该捡起怎样的盒子等等。所以我们需要为此创造出不同的声音以帮助玩家辨别。当玩家刚进入游戏时，他会在最初的几个任务中听到来自幽灵的3种主要声音。这都是Loot Drop员工所配音的：Tom Hall，Alexander Davis（负责QA）各为一个幽灵配音，而Toby Hefflin（负责动画）和我共同为最后一个幽灵配音。而当玩家邀请好友加入游戏时，我们也会添加更多幽灵的声音去代表玩家好友一方。所以我们便聘请了Alexander Brandon去完成这一任务。他一个人便为玩家的幽灵创造了3种不同且可识别的声音（同时他也创造了人质的声音）。

随后我们又为一些非玩家角色进行配音。如Rex Cartagena（Loot Drop中带有本土西班牙语音的男性员工）为玩家所援助的友好反叛者配音，而Loren Hernandez（也是Loot Drop中带有本土西班牙语音的男性员工）为反叛者的领袖配音。最初我们让Rex为所有讲西班牙语的坏人角色进行配音，但Rex的声音实在太温柔了，根本听不出任何凶狠感，所以我便学习了他的口音，亲自为这些坏角色配音。实际上，我们还有一个纠结的点，即当这些坏人向玩家怒吼时到底该着重强调哪个单词，即我们不清楚这一单词带给玩家的“冒犯”程度。我们基于这一单词所呈现的世界而进行讨论。有可能是“‘现在’就把这份文件带离这栋建筑”，或者只是“哦，我认为这没关系，不要担心”。好吧，我并不会在此说出我们用了怎样的强调词。

与许多军事游戏一样，玩家会觉得身边幽灵的对话就像是通过对讲机而发出的声音。在今年的AES上，我在Red Storm关于《幽灵行动：未来战士》的研讨会上了解到，他们的声音创造小组经历了非常严格的录音过程，即利用对讲机进行对话，并录下来自军用车上的扬声器的声音而创造出真实感。尽管这么做的确对于最终效果有所帮助，但是我相信他们最终所创造出的对讲机般真实音效还是源自基于AudioEase技术的Speakerphone（游戏邦注：一款音箱模拟效果器）插件的帮助。而这与我在创造对话时所使用的插件是一样的。这并不是一开始就策划好的，我们只是在事后才意识到使用了相同的解决方法。

遗憾的是，我们最终并未将最有趣的对话整合到游戏中。如果玩家成功靠近一些坏人角色，我们希望玩家们能够听到这些坏人之间的对话。即我们希望表现出这些坏人的不开心，他们遭到不好的待遇，并因此患上了种种病症。John为这些坏人写了许多搞笑的台词（如果他不制作游戏的话一定也是位出色的喜剧作家）。我让Rex将其翻译成西班牙语，并说出其中一方的台词。因为John写了这些台词，并且从小就听家人讲西班牙语，所以我决定让他扮演另一方。可以说整个配音过程都充斥着欢声笑语。我最喜欢的一句台词便是：“嘿，你能帮我看看背上的那个肿块吗？”

拟音

在开发过程中我也一直纠结着是否在游戏中添加一些脚步声。在开发《Pettington Park》（游戏邦注：Loot Drop首款发布于Google+的游戏）时我也遇到了同样的困扰。在尝试了一些占位声音并修改了部分代码（多亏了Steve的帮助）后，我们似乎可以决定角色行走位置的表层材料类型了。地砖所附带的数据将告诉引擎该发出怎样的脚步声，而我们便可以使用相关的声音变量数据和随机性去创造出这种真实般的脚步声。在经过仔细研究后，我们为每种地面类型的脚步声设置了4种变量。例如潜行的士兵便会伴随着靴子与地面发出的噪杂摩擦声。

总结

在致力于多款面向休闲玩家的Facebook游戏后，我们发现创造Facebook游戏声音真的是既有趣又充满挑战。幸运的是，我们团队中的所有人都能友好相处，并努力创造出了能够让我们感到自豪的作品。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Audio Challenges in a “Gamer’s Game for Facebook”

by dren mcdonald

In the last week I did some archive video capture for Ghost Recon Commander before it was taken offline by Ubisoft. In doing so I was reminded of some of the audio questions and answers I came up with during development of the game. I found it oddly meaningful that the day that Ghost Recon Commander was taken offline was almost exactly one year ago, to the day, that I began as Audio Director at Loot Drop. I’m taking that as a sign to reflect on the Ghost Recon Commander experience here.

A GAMER’S GAME FOR FACEBOOK

This was the marketing tagline that was given to GRC when it was announced, and for better or worse, it sums up the first audio conundrum I faced on the project. But first, a little background..

Loot Drop was started by John Romero, Brenda Romero and Tom Hall, and I had previously worked with John and Brenda on Ravenwood Fair at Lolapps. Ravenwood Fair was a fairly typical Facebook game for it’s era (2010) and was designed to be enjoyed by a wide swath of the population (not unlike Frontierville, or Farmville at the time). I continued working on Ravenwood Fair after John and Brenda left to begin Loot Drop, and I worked on Facebook titles such as Idle Worship, Ravenskye City, Zoo World 2, Ravenshire Castle, and a few others. Needless to say, I was pretty familiar with the Facebook game audience (if you can use a blanket term like that.)

Rule # 1 of the Facebook game audience was “don’t do anything to discourage the player from playing the game!” For the audio side that meant that the sounds should be fairly tame (not aggressive), not realistic (usually), and not grating (I avoided recurring sounds in the 1.5k-3k area). Musically, for these types of games, you want to create a safe and happy place. “DON’T DISCOURAGE THE PLAYER FROM PLAYING THE GAME!” I actually saw footage of paid playtesters that revealed players booting up a Facebook game, hearing ONE annoying sound and proceeding to leave the game! There were also more reasonable play testers who would only turn off the audio when they heard something annoying. BUT STILL!

Taking that experience with me, I was asked to join Loot Drop and start in on Ghost Recon Commander (in addition to Pettington Park…I’ll have to do a story on that one too). In Ghost Recon Commander the player is always in danger, the sounds are realistic, aggressive, repetitive and grating (guns, explosions, loot pickups etc). These aren’t the Facebook audio principles I’ve been holding, gripping, and bending to for the last few years…a reconciling was in order!

THE BIG AUDIO PICTURE

So we were making a game with guns and explosions. Not cute forest animals with big heads. If guns and explosions were an accepted part of the soundscape (and wouldn’t drive the player away) then I had a sonic freedom in a Facebook game that I hadn’t previously enjoyed. But it was still a Facebook game. I couldn’t just go Dead Space on this title and freak out the player with audio. I was still assuming that at least some of those non-gamer types might check out this game and I didn’t want them to run screaming. Knowing that John and Brenda were stoked about making this game because of the love they had for the original Ghost Recon game (circa 2001) I went back to check that one out to get some insight into how that title worked with the audio.

If you’ve played that title, you’ll know what a scary, isolating experience it can be. Audio plays a HUGE part in the game, as there is no gameplay music, just ambience. You can also hear, in 3D space, where your enemies are, and if they are coming for you. Creepy. However, GRC was not in a 1st person, 3D space. It’s an isometric game, looking down on the players, similar to an RTS. The 1st person audio approach wouldn’t work with that view and wouldn’t be possible in Flash (not to mention that we had to keep the footprint of this game pretty small).

One thing I did take from the audio experience in the 2001 Ghost Recon was the use of ambience and the psychological impact of the space between sounds. When you are deep in a mission in the 2001 GR, and you hear nothing, (especially right after shooting towards someone), you start to quickly wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake. Quite often you can’t see where the shots are coming from, which also adds to this paranoia. This subtle approach seemed to be a nice way to merge the worlds of Facebook game audio expectations and a core gaming experience.

THE BRENDA FILTER

We knew that GRC would be released at the same time as Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (the console version). So we had some GR:FS weapon sound assets provided by Ubisoft, but almost no music. I think there was one short loop that was temporarily inserted into the pre-alpha build of the game. This gave me a little direction, but having some familiarity with the IP I felt comfortable in finding a musical direction for the game.

At the time of pre-Alpha, we were spending a lot of time running around in the game’s base camp, so I started with writing that music. Brenda was the designer on the game, and I would get notes on the music that she liked a few parts of the piece, but also found specific elements in the music to bother her. After some IM’s and emails it seemed easier to simply listen to the piece together so she could specifically point to parts of the music that she didn’t like. It turned out that this was incredibly helpful for conceiving the rest of the game’s music as I gained insight into what the game designer did and didn’t want in the game music and applied what I learned in that short listening experience to the rest of the game’s music. I’ve posted a little sample here of the music before learning the “Brenda filter”, and after.

Generally, it seemed that providing a simple musical atmosphere, leaving a good amount of space was always better than filling it with cool or eerie sounds. A point that reinforced my initial takeaway from 2001 GR. I think sometimes that as composers, if we don’t have a clear idea about what we want to say we keep throwing ideas against the wall (a new synth patch, some bizarre metal percussion, a WATERPHONE with REVERB!) until there’s just a lot of sound filling up the space. You know you’ve done it. Sometimes composing is simply peeling away most of the unessential ideas our conscious (ego) mind told us we should throw into the mix.

LOTS OF MUSIC

One little known fact about putting music in Facebook games is that the MP3s do not have to live inside of the game swf. You can have a couple of symphonies worth of audio files sitting on a server waiting for their call to come in and stream into the game whenever they are needed. Their playback will not affect the gameplay. The game just starts, and when the loop is buffered it starts to play. I had a lot of talks with John about exploiting this so that we could have different music for each level, and each submap. In addition, we also created looping ambiences for all of these game areas so if the player didn’t want to hear music, they would hear these ambiences instead. But there was a different loop for every level and every submap and we didn’t have to compress the life out of the files either.

One interesting note regarding music and ambiences in GRC is that when the player chose to listen to music, the music track actually had the ambience baked into the file. This came from several discussions between John and Brenda and I and our experiences in 2001 GR. For a while we only put ambience into the build levels, with no music, to see how it felt. Ultimately we decided that the player was probably going to want an experience closer to current shooter games, with the game defaulting to include the music, but we also wanted to hear the ambience (like the original game.) Baking the music with the ambience seemed like a good way to meet all of those needs, and if the player didn’t want the music, they had the option for only ambience.

One of the concepts that struck me in playing both the original GR and GRC (certainly later in GR:FS) was the contrast of high tech weapons/communications/tactics etc versus the organic look of the jungles, the water, the rocks, the wood etc. So, I fiddled around with this idea in the music, contrasting featured tech sounding instruments (drum machine or sound design loops, arpeggiated synths etc) against organic instruments like a drum, cello or french horn. I felt like every level had to have elements of that contrast in the music.

In the first level’s music, I found a tech sounding loop that I manipulated and slowed down and the use of this loop was a blueprint for the rest of the music levels. In every piece there would be some little ‘tech loop’ which I thought of as a Ghost Recon reminder..just to remind the player that tech was ‘on their side’, I guess. The ‘tech loop’ from the 1st level can be heard again in the 10th level’s last musical piece where the player storms into Rivera’s palace and goes after the big boss. However the loop is used in a much different type of music in the last level. I tried to build a dramatic arc in the music throughout the levels, starting with sparse, neutral music, which became sadder, darker and a bit aggressive until the last level where the player was rewarded with some uptempo ‘kicking ass’ kind of music. In this clip here you can hear the Level 1 music first and then the level 10 music which both use the same loop.

SOUND DESIGN

As I mentioned, we had most of the weapon sound assets provided by Red Storm/Ubisoft, so..cool, work is done! Well, even though it was a game which probably had low audio expectations, I still felt that in a shooter we had to at least have weapon shot variations. We had a largely data driven system at Loot Drop, and I worked with an engineer to find a way to include sound variations into the data. So I could load up a new sound swf, input new data and hear how everything sounded in my build whenever I wanted. Though I wasn’t given a hard limit for the audio footprint, I tried to keep things reasonable, so we started with each weapon getting 3 shot variations that would randomize. In a game where ammunition was the currency, the shooting frequency was generally held to a minimum so that the player could keep playing (if you ran out of ammo you had to buy more, with real money, or wait until the game recharged the ammo). So 3 seemed like a number that would work in this situation. We ended up with about 20-25 different weapons, each with 3 shot variations. But we had a lot of dialog.

VO

Most of the dialog consisted of the Ghosts communicating back and forth to each other about where to go, what area to move to, what box to pick up etc. So we had to have a few distinctive voices with a lot of short lines. When the player first starts, there are 3 main voices for the Ghosts that are heard for a during the first few missions. They are all Loot Drop folks: Tom Hall did a Ghost, Alexander Davis (QA) did a Ghost and the last Ghost was a combo of Toby Hefflin (Animator) and myself. As the player got their friends into the game we had to add a few more Ghost voices to cover the 3 Ghost types that would be represented in the player’s friend ladder. So we hired Alexander Brandon to cover those for us, and he did a wonderful job on them. He did 3 totally distinct and recognizable voices for the player Ghosts (and he did all of the hostage voices too).

Then we had some other voices from some of the NPCs in the game. The friendly and grateful rebels that the player was helping (voiced by Rex Cartagena, Loot Drop’s native male spanish speaker) and the leader of the rebels, voiced by Loren Hernandez (Loot Drop’s native female spanish speaker). Initially we had Rex voice all of the spanish speaking bad guys, but Rex is a nice guy, and his voice doesn’t get too angry…so I learned the accent from Rex’ recordings, and did the angry guys as best I could. In fact, there was one word that the bad guys would yell at the player that became an issue..we didn’t know the degree of ‘offensive’ meaning that this word carried. We got conflicting reports on the egregious or not-so-egregious nature of this particular word depending on what part of the world it was being used in. It went from being a show stopping, “get this file out of the build NOW” to “oh, I think it’s ok…don’t worry”. No, I won’t tell you the word.

Like many military games, the dialog between Ghosts sounded like it was coming through a walkie talkie. At AES this year, at the Red Storm panel on Ghost Recon Future Soldier I learned that their sound team went through this rigorous recording process of putting dialog through a walkie talkie and recording the source from a speaker in a military vehicle to achieve ultimate realism. While I believe they were able to salvage some of that work, most of their ultimate walkie talkie realism came in the form of AudioEase’s Speakerphone plugin. It turns out that this is the same plugin that I used for my dialog treatment, and it was also the choice of the Ubisoft team in Paris doing the single player GRFS campaign. We didn’t plan this out, we just realized later that we all came up with the same solution.

The funniest moment of the dialog didn’t make it into the game, unfortunately. If the player was successfully sneaking up on a couple of the bad guys, we wanted the player to hear a little bit of a conversation between the bad guys. The idea was that these guys were pretty unhappy, that they weren’t being treated well and that they were getting sick. John had written some hilarious lines (if he wasn’t making games, he could be a comedy writer) that were to occur between these guys. I brought Rex in to translate into Spanish, and read one of the parts. Since John wrote the lines, and has listened to his family speak Spanish his entire life, I wanted him to act the other part. I think we ended up just laughing in the sound room for about half of the day trying to get straight takes. My favorite line: “Hey, could you look at this lump on my back for me?”

FOLEY

The decision to include footsteps in the game was always being kicked around in my head throughout development. I was having the same dilemma on Pettington Park at the time. After trying a few tests with placeholder sounds and a little tweaking in the code (thanks Steve!), it seemed like we could make this work as long as we could easily determine what type of surface material the characters were walking on. The ground tiles had data attached to them that could tell the engine what surface footstep sound to use, and we could use our sound variation data and randomization to achieve a fairly realistic footstep sound. I believe we had 4 variations for each foot per surface type and I leaned towards subtlety on the sounds. These were supposed to be sneaky super soldiers, we couldn’t have them clomping around the fields in loud boots. Here’s a little clip of some of the footsteps in game.

TANGO DOWN!

After working on so many Facebook games aimed at casual players (en masse) it was refreshing (and challenging) to be given the chance to expand the pallet of a Facebook game’s sound picture. It’s always a fortunate situation when everyone on the team gets along well, and is working together to make something which they want to be proud of, and this was certainly the situation with Ghost Recon Commander.(source:gamasutra)