Audio Production for Square Enix’s Hitman

 August 1, 2013, Independent Game Developers Association Summit, San Francisco-Thomas Bartschi from IO Interactive described learnings, both positive and negative, of the audio design for the Hitman: Absolution game. The insights and explanations for their choices and the closed-loop changes in critical game design that affected audio and the game.

The audio production had many successes and failures over the course of the 6-year development. They developed a new audio engine and integrated it into the Square Enix game engine. The graphical engine allowed drag and drop of assets, even though the assets often didn’t exist. This design allowed the sound design to move into the mainstream of the game development.

Part of their audio ambitions were to establish an identity for the Hitman character. This was to be a “James Bond” sound and theme that represented the various mental states of the character: normal, alert, and combat. They also made special sounds for such objects as the fiber wire used for killing, and sounds for types of killings and other characters and objects. The underlying music score was a classical choir and was made to show the cinematic qualities of the production.

They created all audio, except for the dialogs, in house. The responsive score provides sound and location keys as well as some game features. The early versions of the sounds were not cinematic, so much of the work was to generate a rich, lush sound quality.

As a creative director, Bartschi had some key words to define the sound and facilitate teamwork. The five rules for sound development were: developing the game engine and game in parallel allowed for the mix of technology and game, resulting in a good balance; ideas should bounce around and be discussed and refined; time limits require fast iterations, so little time can be devoted to small details; keep a high view from the game perspective, so you need to play the game; everyone should state their opinions.

On the creative side, they changed so the people could define the ambience and the full sound design capabilities allowed for emotional sound design. The implementation phase required efforts to reduce tool complexity and increase sharing of audio assets throughout the game. Sounds indicate something to the player, so reducing the number of assets also reduces the time to implement the soundscape.

The environmental sounds help with transitions by adding music and sound effects. They captured live sounds as part of their audio assets, and used them in a minimalistic manner. Dialog was generated with a complex AI. The cut scenes and dialog were motion captured at Giant Studios at one time to allow better synchronization.

Even though the complex scenes like crowds had 8-10 layers of sounds, the new tools made application and mix fairly simple. This enabled the music to be adaptive and cinematic, as the music could change with use modes. The mix of ambient and dialog could be easily arranged as well as selection of scored and location music.

The game has 3.5-4 hours of content and themes, so AI-based music helped for general moment sounds. The cut scenes required transitions from game to cut scene music, and levels, so they added radios in the scenes to be a source of the music and created location-based music.

The AI has four states indicated in the tool with colors: white indicates calm, yellow shows suspicious, orange calls out alert, and red is for combat. The scenarios added stingers for key card, disguises, etc. and also had other transitions. They created 10-12 random stingers which were added into the audio time line to ink to the game engine.

Some issues in developing and implementing new tools related to the tool functionality and integration into their flows. Some level of customization is needed, especially when the tool developers are not involved with user research. They had to develop lots of sounds and the slow creation process forces late mixes.