Weapon Design

Weapon Design Post.

For this blog post I am going to be explaining my process of creating and implementing sounds for the Shock Rifle in the UDK Engine.

Looking at the Shock Rifle, you can clearly see there is a futuristic electric charge coming within the gun. This detail of the gun is what made me decide to make it futuristic sounding. The primary shot, which is left click, was created by layering a sine wave that I had processed and a processed electrical current shock sound. I also needed to have another variation for the primary shot because hearing the same sound many times can drive someone crazy. For the second variation I brought out the high ends just to change slightly, but keep the sound similar because if they were too different it would not sound right. The secondary shot, which is right click, has three different elements to it, the initial release of the orb, the orb traveling, and the orb colliding into an object. The release of the orb is very similar to the primary shot, but with a few EQ changes. The traveling of the orb is a processed hum of machinery. Finally, the collision of the orb with an object is a processed explosion with reverb at a lower volume. The collision did not work as well as I planned because the impact sound is way to quiet, especially if it hits a nearby object. This was the only thing that did not fit very well. There is another element to the Shock Rifle, which is the combo. The combo is the firing of the secondary shot and then the primary shot that creates a black hole type of explosion. I wanted to make it sound like the explosion was bringing in all the energy around it, so I made a vacuum-like futuristic sound by layering a processed sound with a pre-made laser type sound and a distant explosion sound. The next two sounds do not have to do with firing the gun. The sounds are the ammo pickup and the gun pickup. I decided to make them a little different because I wanted comical sounds just for fun. The gun pickup is a processed sine wave layered with a processed spring-like sound that I had found. The ammo pickup was just a simple light beeping sound that I had EQ to bring out the high ends and I also placed a tiny delay on it to brighten it up a little more.

For the implementation I had to add my sounds to the pre-made soundcues for each sound individually. For the primary shot, in the soundcue editor, that had attenuation, mixer and random nodes, I added soundnodewaves of the two variations of the primary shot. The random node is to cycle through both sounds at random. For the first element of the secondary shot, in the soundcue editor, that had attenuation and mixer, I added the soundnodewave of the secondary fire. For the traveling element, that had attenuation, mixer and looping, I added the soundnodewave of the orb traveling. The reason for having the looping node was to make sure the sound constantly loops until the orb stops traveling. For the last element, the impact, the pre-made soundcue had attenuation and mixer and I added the soundnodewave of the impact. For the combo, ammo pickup, and gun pickup I did the same thing in the soundcue editor has for the impact. Each sound had individual soundcues except for the two variations of the primary shot. After I had placed my sounds in the pre-made soundcues I had to work in Kismet to have my sounds implemented into the game. In Kismet I had to go to the playsound of each specific sound and add my sound to preferences of the playsound.

That is how I created and implemented my sounds of the Shock Rifle into the game using the UDK Engine.

http://youtu.be/d3CYsWRHIgQ - Link to the Shock Rifle video.