Sound Design

BORDERLANDS 3 – Sound Design

INTERFACE

I designed the holo layer feedback for the UI in BL3. I’d say about 90% of the elements making up these sounds are custom serum patches. Not in the video since it is long already, I also supported combat HUD feedback for skills becoming ready, pre-fire warning ticks, etc…

My personal favorite are the little holo sign Open/Closes the vending machines make. Always felt satisfying hearing them close behind me as I walked away. In groups they become almost musical.

SKAGS

The skags are a mix of old and re-designed content. Most of the smaller sized skags (non-badass) are new design work using custom source we recorded from two dogs of employees.

Mixed in is new “inward singing” source I performed. The projectiles for the badass and elemental variants have a lot of serum work in them.

RAMPAGER

Vocals:

Aluminum Baking Pan + Rosin’d Bow Vocals through a long ribbed tube Normal vocals into Large Diaphragm Mic Animal Source as supplemental sweetener

Implementation involved creation of some new UE4 blueprint, wiring into existing design blueprint, wwise setup and projectile troubleshooting.

MALIWAN HEAVY

The ice impact elements are custom rock impact source from tow sessions I recorded in our foley pits at Gearbox. I also created a grain processing chain to “icey-ize” additional stylized ice sweetener content layered into many of these and the ice skag variants.

The frozen/flame projectiles are 100% serum design. All the synth work on the variants are serum patches I created with the exception of some of the badass variant sweeteners.

This enemy type had a notoriously sensitive blueprint, so unfortunately, many audio issues had to ship due to the risk of introducing additional unknown bugs.

RATCHES

Most of the vocals used to create their voices are recordings of my voice, although a lot of their snorts are actually recordings of Josh Davidson during the same session (We took turns engineering/performing).

I also recorded my palms in our mixed material foley pit to create all their footsteps. Wings are various sugar/spice packets… etc…

CAPTAIN TRAUNT

Much of Traunt’s content has a lot of… you guessed it… custom Serum patches! Most of the fast oscillating elements utilize serum.

The ice impacts are using the same rock source I mentioned above, mixed in with granularized processing.

Some unfortunate audio bugs were forced to ship with the game so there is a decent amount of missing audio in these captures.

MISSION UI

Layered serum patches created all the synth source for the objective updates and then swishes and hits designed for the text movement.

The source patches (5 variations) have randomized pitch in addition to randomized pitch set on the wwise object so these frequent sounds never get old.

Weirdly… the first iteration I made landed on this one.