The Epic of Tia
Project Snapshot
The Epic of Tia is a Medieval MMOPRG launched on PC. The game is aimed to bring players the original slow rhythmic, hard-core MMO: it's not easy to gain experience and skills are very valuable; all numerical values are small and the player is easily killed by a small monster. The game successfully kept a big number of players and the remake version was released in 2022.
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Tools: ProTools, Reaper, Fmod Designer
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Engine: NeoX
Sound Design Overview
The Epic of Tia is my last project that used Fmod Designer. At the start of the project, my main task was to determine and make sample sound effects with level designers and figure out how to implement sound effects into the engine with programmers.
In the middle development period, I sent sound effects production plans to content providers to meet the quick developing speed, revised and implemented these assets, supervised the whole voice recording process with the quest designer.
Near the end of the project, my job was to cooperate with audio experts to refine mixing, figure out area reverb volume function with programmers, and optimize sound play logic.
This is one boss skill I made:
Dubbing & Communication
Although the quantity of voice lines is not too many in this project, I plan to prepare early and take more time to communicate with the director before recording. When we decided to start the session on time, the director and I had already talked for nearly 8 hours about localization, clarification of translation, and emotional changes for every sentence. For different roles, I chose South London, Irish, Scotland, England, and other English accents to introduce diverse backgrounds and characteristics and hide the relationship linked with these accents. The high-quality idea exchange and understanding make the whole recording process very efficient. Thanks to adequate preparation, we can focus on exploring the variety of emotional changes for all lines instead of wasting time explaining the essential information and clarifying misunderstandings.
After this project, I started responsible for communicating and supervising all the voice recording sessions in our sound team.
The feedback email from the director
Implementation
To make the player always hear the essential sound effects in different gameplay conditions, we classified all skills into three levels: low, medium, and high, based on the damage. EQ, 3D Pan Level, volume, and other parameters are used to make a smooth sound attenuation. We also set multiple templates to implement sound assets quickly.
Fmod Designer project overview
Postmortem
This project had a unique character: nearly a large part of the players would leave after playing the first time, but all the kept players would continue playing for a very long time. All these retained players were also like MU Online, The Legend of Mir 2, and Diablo 2. These old games had some similar properties: slow gameplay and brutal difficulty. The Epic of Tia grasped and refined all these elements, successfully attracting people "who like suffering."
I was sent to this project by our audio team and worked with other peers for nearly two years. During the development, the music guy changed four times, and I was the only one working from the start to the end. With the game designer's advice, I also tried to transplant the audio project from Fmod Designer to Fmod Studio, and nearly all the parameters were successfully moved. But Fmod Studio couldn't well compatible with the engine, so we returned to Fmod Designer. It was still a valuable experience to check out the differences between these two generations' audio middleware.