Artefact 2: Sound design for "SUPERHOT"

Why SUPERHOT?

The reason I chose this game in particular is for a multitude of reasons. For one, it’s a game I’ve played in my own time that I’m familiar with and enjoy, however, the main reason is a little deeper than that. I chose it because of the unique influence the games mechanics have on its sound. The game is a first person shooter and the main premise is that time moves relative to how fast the player is moving. If the player is standing still, it moves very slowly, if the player is moving at full speed, time moves normally. This means that any sound played in-game has to be warped according to this factor, making this game in particular a rather interesting one to design sound for. After doing some research online, I found that Ableton’s warping feature was the perfect tool for a project like this, as it offers precise control over the speed in which sounds are played, exactly what I was looking for.

Behind the Noise

Seeing as there are so many individual sounds included in this project, I’ll cover the parts that I find the most interesting.

Diegetic vs Non-Diegetic Sound

To start off, I had to distinguish between the sounds that were present in the games world (diegetic), and those outside of it (non-diegetic) before choosing which sounds to pan, as there are effects like the on-screen text which wouldn’t make sense to warp as they exist in the player character’s mind.

Advanced Warping

As well as warping sound in time with the clip, I decided to take inspiration from media such as the matrix and add reverb during the slowed-down moments to further give the impression that the sound waves have slowed in accordance to time itself. Combining this factor with that of the last paragraph, I decided to put all diegetic sound into a group and automate a reverb on that group track to save time fine-tuning every track individually.

Panning

In order to make the clip feel more immersive, I decided to pan all gunshots in accordance to their position on the screen, to me this makes a big difference particularly during the times where either big gunfights are happening, or a bullet is travelling by very slowly in either direction.

Sound Combination

Additionally, there were some cases where sounds had to be combined to achieve the effect I desired. For example, when throwing the katana, I didn’t feel like the regular throw sound cut it, so I tried to use the katana swing noise I already had. However this one didn’t have enough weight to it, my solution to this was to combine the swing sound effect with a pitched up version of the regular throw sound.

Hotswitch Cooldown Static

A sound effect I was really proud of was the static that plays after each time the player switches bodies (known as Hotswitching). Every time this happens you see static on-screen to indicate that the mechanic is unavailable and recharging. I decided to add audible electric noise to go along with it to give the player an audible indication the ability is recharging. As well as this, it also improves immersion. The little details go a long way to selling you in any field of sound.

Additional Ideas

Due to time constraints, there were parts of the project I wanted to develop but didn’t have the time to. For example different sound effects for different kinds of on screen alerts, as well as adding footsteps for on-screen characters moving. I think the project is still strong without these elements but the addition of these would be a cherry on top of what’s already there. The alert sounds would’ve taken a considerable amount of time to find/may have been needed to be recorded using foley. The footsteps also would’ve been really difficult to get right, as I would’ve needed to place them all individually, potentially including off-screen footsteps. As well as this, they would all still need to be panned/warped accordingly, which I think in total would take more time than it’d be worth to have them there.

All sounds found in the project were taken from SoundQ, no foley sound was created.

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