This weeks devlog entry is by Em!
Hi, I’m Em and I work with Gord at A Shell in the Pit Audio making sounds for Parkitect.
This week I had an exciting opportunity to visit Vancouver’s one and only Amusement Park; Playland, on a field recording trip. Christopher Tammik joined in the adventure and we each attended armed with a recorder and microphone. We went thinking that we were going to have to be quite stealthy, but ended up only sneaking our gear under clothes and scarves on the more intense rides. We rode the mini train a ridiculous amount of times with no questions asked! (With the exception of some curious kids, which you’ll hear in the following recording.)
The aim for this game in particular was to capture as many mechanical, engine, and rattling sounds as possible while avoiding people and music. Not the easiest thing to do even on an overcast monday, but we did manage to grab some great stuff. The interesting thing to note about what you hear in the game is that these recordings are not going to be used only for their corresponding rides, and they’re not going straight in as recorded. The squeaky clacking of the mini-train could be a single layer amidst multiple for any ride in the game.
So we pull discrete loops and segments out of these recordings. For example, this mini coaster:
What you build in your theme park won’t correspond to this 30 second long mini coaster ride. We’ll simply extract similar bumpy and rattly segments of the recording, edit them together, and make it loop seamlessly so it can work for any coaster you build. In Parkitect we create 5 different speed loops per coaster, including the climb loop, which this ride had a great sound for. We were also able to get close enough to the lift mechanism on Playland’s wooden coaster (one of the oldest in the world!) and record a super long segment. That one will most likely be hidden in a couple different rides. In the Wooden Coaster, it was very challenging to keep the microphone steady; it was hard enough holding on and being thrown about the seat.
Other than coasters we were after engines. The louder the engine, the more it would drown out all the background noise of the crowd and music, which all gets recorded and added in separately. It was usually loudest inside the ride, so we spent a lot of time running around riding everything we could. (Yes, this is a real job.) Though it did get to the point where even the kids rides like tea cups were making us feel sick. Note to anyone planning something like this: Do not ride the most spinny thing first.
Here is one of my favourite engine sounds, the scrambler. I cleaned some of the crowd shouts out a little bit but the engine was powerful enough that I didn’t need to alter it too much.
That’s all for now, next up is a trip to a sightseeing train crawling through a vast park. Hope you enjoyed reading about our fun trip. See if you can find these sounds somewhere in the game later! It won’t be easy.
Here’s a merry little video to close off.