When we started making our game we decided to make it photorealistic (or as close to our team can get) this makes for a very immersive experience for the player, unfortunately when you set that bar in one part of your gameplay you need to match it do your best to match it everywhere. So when working on sound design in our game I took pride in going for the more authentic audio I could get.
Sound Effects:
A lot of sounds in our game were sounds that we used from Artlist.com, a professional website where everything from music and sound effects uploaded for use. Although it's not as easy as dragging and dropping this sound and it being in game this helped with our production as none of us had and skills in recording professional audio for the game.
When getting these sound effects in engine we needed to run them through another program called audacity this is purely because the audio file that these sound effects came in was an '32-bit .wav' when unreal has a problem processing this audio so instead we needed to run it through audacity and export it in '16 bit .wav' format.
Once in this format you can put the audio file in unreal, but that still isn't the end of it, here you see a bun of audio file that theoretically you can just put in but that makes they very basic, you can change how the player will hear them. so what you need to do is make an Sound Cue for them.
this picture shows an audio cue and the six sound wave files that will be going into it, these are all for the Taskalo a NPCs in our game.
this is what the sound cue looks like once I was done setting it up, as you can see it have it set to loop those sound randomly and this make for a much more authentic way for giving these NPCs in my game a natural selection of audio to them. the Cue also can be used to change the audio drop off in a 3D environment making it good to hear them faintly at distance.
Lastly it is worth mentioning that all these cues can be set into audio classes, this is a perfect way to generalise audio for example all my Audi is split between different classes, if the whole game is too quite I will change the master volume if the music is too quite I can bump that up. the means that I don't need to go to every file and adjust them separately since I just clicked what audio class they were when I set them up.
Sound Effects Linked to Animations:
Following on from that I wanted to cover the detail put into making sure charater make the right sounds during their animations at the right point in their animations.
Here I have a bunch of sound files as well as there sound cues so I already have these set up ready to be put in game, so I need to open up the animation files to link them to the right point.
here you can see the full animations timeline on the bottom. I had to go in and make 2 tracks that notify the engine to do an event at these points in the animation, then I set them to play an audio file, then saying to play the sound of the footstep.
this is the blend space for the charater so I needed to make sure every singe animation (each one of those white dots) has the sound cue notifiers set up so no matter what animation plays/what directing the player is running it still plays their sound effects.
I also had to set up a the tracks for the crunching blend space as well, this means that no matter how the player moves the sound still plays.
Lastly I want to cover something to do with the sound cues for these more repetitive audio in the game. when a piece of audio like a footstep will play about 2-4 times a second you will start to hear how it is perfectly repeated and it will sound really fake.
So because of this I had to put modulators on a lot of these sound effects, this means that the volume and pitch of the sound coming out this cue will always be a random value between 0.8 -1.2 making each step sound authentic and unique and adds a perfect level of immersion to the player.