The Viking Village Part I: A New World

In my last post I discussed my love of video game music and why I’m working on these projects. The first thing I did was download and install Unity and FMOD. I followed the tutorial and imported the scene “The Viking Village”. The teacher in the tutorial has his own suggestions on sounds to add (I did follow his suggestions), but I wanted to add my own flavor to the scene. So I decided to start with some market research.

I spent some time playing Guild Wars 2 (GW2) and thinking about what other sounds should exist in this game.

Perhaps I have mentioned before, Guild Wars 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games. When Guild Wars 2 came out in 2012 I purchased the game along with a group of friends as a way to stay in touch as we all moved on with our lives. We were across several states and four time zones, but still able to spend time together admidst our busy lives and growing careers. Now, nearly 8 years later, the group of friends are only somewhat still together. Like in reality, some are rarely seen, and some new friends were made. We experienced successes, marriages, babies, divorces, job changes, moving across the country, and everything else that happens over 8 years. Still, it’s been a nice way to “feel close” to old friends. I feel like the experience of GW2 is a post of its own…Ok enough of that nostalgia, back to sound design.

I thought about what sounds should be in this environment. Is this a ghost town? Is this a bustling marketplace? What’s going on in the world around and what sounds are pertinent to the story. Just like in composing for a scene or for a commercial, I think about what is the purpose of the sound design, or for that matter, the music?

Note: That’s not to say I don’t think about these things in concert music, but concert music has more space for interpretation and does not necessarily need a linear story arc.

I decided to open up my imagination and create a little story for the town, this would provide the “backstory” and the reason for all of the sounds. I literally googled “Viking town names” and landed with: Houlgate.

Houlgate: Norse Root: gata (meaning way, street or passage)

So let’s come up with a little backstory shall we? Hmmm…well,

Houlgate is a small outlying settlement in a mountainous country. It’s far enough from a main city that townspeople live there, but it serves as the last outpost to the mountains of the northwest. On one side is access to the sea, an important method of communication with the east, but this is not a merchant city. This area is known for being rugged and rough and unbeknownst to you (the player), there are mysterious happenings in the mountains. Danger lurks across the valley…bandits, dragons, goblins? Who knows…

Ok, that was a bit of fun, so why all this lore…

In the scene you see the sun is setting (in the west), and mountains just north of that. Often the weather patterns travel east to west. I imagine this town as having a colder climate with weather that can shift suddenly, making this outpost all the more important to visitors as a last haven before the forest and the mountains. In the scene (graciously provided to me as a template by Unity!), it’s autumn, the snow has melted away but much of the ground is wet (that means mud!). With the air still being a little cold, there’s a different sound to it, you know? I feel like the sounds in a rural setting at the edge of winter before spring have a very distant sound to them. There is an echo in the air and a feeling of distance, a lot of empty space out there.

So with all of these decisions, here are the sounds that make sense for our scene:

• Torches: light for the town and a little bit of warmth too. These are necessary for the village, so their sound should be audible.
• Wolf in the distance: on the edge of the town near the mountains I decided to add a wolf howl, just a nice reminder of the surrounding nature.
• Water: There’s a shoreline that is somewhat inlet like a cove. The water isn’t very deep at the shoreline, the waves are calmer during this scene. The water should be audible but the water is calm.
• Crane: Now this idea I totally stole from the tutorial video. This object provides a great opportunity for some interesting effects though.
• Armory: There are a lot of buildings in the town. Since it’s an outpost, I figure there should be some sort of armory with the sounds of swords clashing, people talking, grunting and general commotion. It’s not a violent or overwhelming sound, but meant to add the existence of others in the town.
• Boat House: There are boat parts throughout the north side of the village, so we need a Boat House where they’re being worked on.
• Townspeople:
  • Bartley: Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance. This is the best game I ever played on Playstation 2. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of other phenomenal games. Remember Killzone? The music and cinematics of Killzone were phenomenal. However, I played and replayed BGDA 1 & 2 a dozen times. Just a great game. And in any town there was always a trader, someone to offer you new wares. Bartley was the reliable trader. I decided to ask a friend who also loved this game to record some talking sounds in his best Bartley voice.
  • Guards: At the two gates of the town I will add guards. They won’t say much, but they’ll say something as you walk past them.
  • Female Elf: This is partly out of accessibility. One of the assets I have to work with (for free) in Unity is an Elven Female warrior. Perfect! She’ll be the type of NPC (non-player character) that gives the player a job to do (a quest).
  • Others: I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure out some other character assets to place…
• Other animals: The village has to have livestock, right? So, I’m going to use one of the buildings as a small barn. I’ll add some chickens, a cow, and a goat.
• Tavern: In this scene, you cannot enter any of the closed buildings, but that doesn’t mean they’re not active. One of them will be a tavern, it will be active with people, so you’ll hear clanging, voices, and general commotion.
• Footsteps: Obviously we need the sound of footsteps so that it is apparent that the player is a biped and not a floating brain.

That is a lot of sounds, but all should help build the world we’re walking through.

Finally, the music. I decided on something somber, distant, and generally moody. This isn’t a high-tech village, so no electronic sounds. Of course, I’m coming to this scene with all of my bias from previous soundtracks like Skyrim and Lord of the Rings. That being said, I wanted a simple atmospheric soundtrack that is okay repeating. The music is somewhat non-linear. There are locations in the scene where you will go and it will trigger the “chorus” or perhaps get quieter and trigger the “verse”. In doing this I wanted to be able to build the excitement in some areas while relating a more contemplative feeling in other spaces.

In the next post I’ll discuss more of how I built some of these sounds and placed them in the scene.