DEATH JR. 2: ROOT OF EVIL – Develop Interview

While working in-house at Back Bone Entertainment, I was lucky to come onto a project which exposed me to a variety of valuable experiences. This was Death Jr: Root of Evil. Firstly a Sony PSP title, which later was migrated over to Wii for the upcoming world wide release of the Wii console.

My first role on the project was to help solidify the sound design as an external resource to the team. By external, I was purely an asset creator and working as I would have if I had been an external contractor. I created additional weapons for the two player characters, many many creature sounds & their weapons and abilities as well as environmental sounds (not ambiances).

The quirky nature of the title provided a deep creative environment where imagination could run wild. A dream project for any game audio enthusiast.

Some time after the title hit the stores, the upcoming Wii console was announced to the world. Death Jr 2 was perfect for that console, and so began the process of migrating the game across to the Wii.

Typically porting moves in the opposite direction, from console to handheld. Thus artists are able to downsize resolutions, audio team can minimize assets and down sample the audio quality to fit within the hand-held platforms restrictions. This was the opposite for us and with it came a set of problems we had to overcome.

The issues I had to tackle as an audio lead were :

• The assets were designed for handheld.
• The Wii game was to be played on TV with good audio and 5.1 support.
• The Wii version was to support multiplayer split-screen mode.
• We were told we had to re-use the internal proprietary audio system and upgrade it to support the wii and 5.1.
• Loss of 44khz final content. Lack of audio asset management and storing files on a local PC that wasn’t backed up and departure of that person from the company caused a loss of 2000 something edited, EQ’d and processed audio from the original sources.
• To conserve memory and or time on the PSP, no ambiances were created and the music was left on all the time. One of the audio features required was allowing the player to turn off music – thus requireing the need to author 5.1 ambiances for the entire game.
• Designers re-authoring many areas of the game and creating new puzzles which required audio support.
• 8 weeks to do all this!

The plusses that helped with this task were:

• Majority of audio assets were present and implemented.
• Fully playable levels and characters.
• Engineers who bent over backwards to help with designing tools and work with me to implement the 5.1 splitscreen audio system, ambiance system and tools to speed up the iteration process and mixing process.

Here’s an interview I had with John Broomhall about the experience:

The migration of Death Jr: Root of Evil from PSP to Wii handed Backbone’s lead sound designer Yannis Brown a blank canvas.