Warhammer 2: Total War’s sound designer Valentin Goellner and dialogue engineer Will Tidman recently talked about their beautifully noisy work for the game on Totalwar blog. Quite lengthy interview sheds light on their background, approach and – most importantly – to what extent they go when they create sounds. The photos of their experiments are mostly interesting.

Performance and immersion are key.

Through the questions about their stories of involvement in the game and several studios previously, Tidman and Goellner stress the importance on creating immersive and impressive sounds. Their work process shows that – when creating them – a certain degree of organic, believeable sounding needs to be achieved (in the context of ‘living’ creatures sounds).

Performance is key in many aspects, and the ability to replicate that performance over and over again is quite rare. Goellner answers also show that fruit, walrus sounds and other natural sounds provide some of the best material, especially when processed appropriately.

via totalwar.com blog article: “Bringing the Undead to Life with Audio in Total War: WARHAMMER II”

It’s grat to see dialogue engineer’s side of things. The techniques of modifying sounds vary, and Tidman talks of using reverbs and special technique of making the voice seem dead. He also provides more detail on the sheer amount of voice work that needs to be processed for such big games – a fact that may be omitted by some.

For this and other great details, the interview – click here! – is just great and filled to the brim with intriguing details!

Contributor

Jan Szafraniec

Fasicinated by everything that is noisy, minimal and industrial. He spends most of the time writing and floating around in ambient. He's been loyally professing videogame music for a decade and won't ever stop.