Unreal Sounds

I would like to start off by welcoming you to my first blog post on sound design. I will be showing you how I went about creating the sounds for a Shock Rifle from the Unreal Development Kit (UDK). The design approach I took for the weapon was set in both the real world and in sci-fi. The gun itself is simple looking in nature but with its sci-fi origins I felt it should have more depth to it through its sound. I have included both a video and the sound files for the weapon below, please go ahead and play each one while I go ahead and describe the process of building each sound.


The simplest sound here is the ammo pickup. I felt that this type of object in a game needed to be both instantly recognizable but not overpowering to the player. The ammo pickup is a 2 layer sound, the first layer being a bell one would find at a counter to ring for service while the other is a system warning alarm for a computer.

Both of these sounds where slowed down slightly with a time variation plug in with that I took the bell and pitched it up a few semitones while the alarm was pitched up. This produced a quick and noticeable alert to the player indicating they picked up ammo.
Next sound I would like to talk about is the guns main fire. For this sound I wanted a very alien and electrical tone to it. I used a cannon fire shot for the initial pop of the shock rifle with a crossbow being fired and cannonball flying by to give it a mechanical sound. The cannon shot was processed through a distortion plugin with an "alien voice" setting and pitched up while the cannonball whistle was sped up and placed through the same distortion setting as the cannon fire and together all sounds were given a slight reverb. The main fire is layered in game with the sound of an electrical arch that was distorted using a "dirty crunch" setting.

The alternate fire for the gun is an electrical looking orb. This alt fire not only explodes on contact but the player can fire at it to create an implosion type effect. To create the orb being fired I took that sound of an M203 grenade being fired and ran it through a pitch changing plugin to bring it down some to give it more of a punch. Layered with this is in game a pulsing energy loop processed through a wah-wah effect plugin for a traveling sound. The implosion sound uses two sounds layered, first is a electrical explosion distorted a little with a "dirty crunch" setting and a rocket launcher firing sped up 200% through a wah-wah plugin.

For the weapon raising and lowering I went with various sounds layered on top of each other. Both include handguns being taking in and out of leather gun holsters, various guns being handled around and cocked. These sounds were ran through a distortion plugin to give them a gritty sound. For the lowered weapon sound, I reversed some of the drawn weapons. Both sounds were sped up to match the animation in game.

SoundCues in UDK were a big help. They allowed me to have the sounds played at the right time and even modulated them in real time in order to give the sounds some variation. For example the main fire for the shock rifle had a SoundCue that randomly selected one of 2 wav files to play, along with this another Cue was used to trigger the main fire layer each time the weapon was fired. Without the SoundCues I would have had to make numerous sounds for just one gun. This would of lead to multiple separate triggers being use for each file while causing RAM issues for the game.
I hope you have enjoyed read my blog post on this fun project. I am always pushing my self to come up interesting ways to design new sounds. Stay tuned to our page to keep up with our latest projects and sound packs. Thanks again for stopping by and stay shiny.