Novastrike Suit AI voice & Player status Feedback (Copy)
In this blog I’m going to show how I did Suit AI and Feedback for Gravitus within Novastrike.
During our playtest of Novastrike, we got many critiques that the players were not receiving enough feedback regarding events within the game. This included now knowing how much energy they had in their suit and not knowing if they were really low on health or healthy. Of course, all of these things were shown with in-game UI but it still wasn’t enough, the players didn’t feel like they were in danger when they were low on HP. They also couldn’t really know that they were gaining energy on each hit of their attacks, which is an important mechanic within our game.
To fix these problems, I decided I needed to step back and look at the player elements that needed to have clear feedback within the game. The most important being:
-How much health the player has.
-How much energy the player has.
With player health, the player needs to know just from sound, the status of their character, and whether they are doing fine or in immediate danger. As for the energy I needed to design a system that could quickly update the player on how much energy they have available. The idea I came up with was to create an AI for the player’s suit that would update the player on their status, whether good or bad.
I first went into Ableton and recorded myself so that I could add effects and turn it into something that sounds like a menacing suit AI. I really wanted the AI to sound like something that you would hear in a Sci-FI horror game. Menacing but informative…
For these recordings, I had to record them in a modular way so that I it sounded as if the lines were programmed instead of being voice acted.
Afterwards, I then took those recordings and brought them over to Wwise to begin implementing them into the game.
I first created a switch called “Energy Switch” which was tied to the player’s energy. Whenever it reached a certain level, say 65%, it would swap to that switch , that way the AI voice knows what voice line to call depending on the player's energy.
Creating switch containers for all the voice lines, I then had an easy way to control which lines were being played based on the player’s current energy.
In regards to player health, I did a similar thing with the AI voice, but I also created a loop in Ableton that would play whenever the player entered the “Critical” health state. This loop would play, and then lowpass all other sounds within the game so that the only thing the player can hear is the panting of their character and creepy ambiance that followed.
