Footsteps: Setting them up in Wwise

Photo by Olia Gozha on Unsplash

While not the most exciting part of a game's soundtrack, footsteps are an aspect that should not be overlooked; especially for first-person games like mine. They serve the obvious purpose of letting the player know that their character is moving, but also present more information than you might expect. They can let you know what surface you're walking on, gravel grass, rocks, bones... and will often be the first sound you hear a differing reverb applied to when entering a new space like a huge hall or a cramped cave. They make characters feel grounded and in multiplayer games the player can listen to their surroundings for their enemy's approaching footsteps to give them an advantage in a gunfight.

As you can see, they do quite a lot!

Keeping all of that in mind, I began setting up my footsteps system in Wwise and Unreal. I started by creating my hierarchy in Wwise that would house my footsteps sounds.

In the above image, you can see that the hierarchy begins with a "Footsteps" Actor-Mixer. I use this mainly for housekeeping reasons to keep everything tidy within a contained structure, however I will be using this later to control gain and auxiliary sends when I get to the mixing stage. Next is the "Surface" Switch Container which is an important component for footsteps as this will allow for switching of the material that is being walked on. 

The Switch Container interacts with Switches that I created in the Game Syncs tab. As you can see I have created a "Surface" Switch Group that contains Dirt, Grass and Stone which are some of the materials that will be present within my game. If, for example, the player walks onto dirt in the game, the Switch Container will trigger the "Dirt" Sequence Container. This completes a set of actions in a selected order chosen by myself. In this case, I have a sequence that will simulate right and left leg movement. 

The above image shows the playlist for the Dirt sequence. First it will play the "Left Foot" Sequence Container which consists of a clothing Foley sample, followed by a random container that will play a random footstep sample from a pool of chosen dirt footstep samples. This will all happen when one instance of footsteps is called while the player is standing on dirt. It will then follow the same pattern for the right foot the next time it is called. 

To give the illusion of left and right foot movement, I edited the speaker panning position ever so slightly to the right and left for each corresponding side and slightly pitched up the right foot to give that side more distinct variation. As I have not recorded my footsteps sounds at this stage, I am currently using placeholder samples while I ensure that it is working within Unreal Engine.

Next time, integrating into Unreal Engine!