Creating an Aural Adventure for ‘Angry Birds Journey’

From games to feature films to animated series, the Angry Birds IP has become a successful cross-media franchise that's still going strong. Here, the Rovio Entertainment sound team talks about creating sound for their latest release Angry Birds Journey!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of Rovio Entertainment

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That very first Angry Birds mobile game (released in 2009) was a great escape from my torturous and lengthy commute. It was addictive and distracting, and just plain fun. It’s crazy – but not hard to believe – that there have been over 30 Angry Birds game releases since then.

Here, Rovio Entertainment‘s sound team on Angry Birds Journey – senior sound designer Can Uzer, sound designer Toivo Kallio, senior composer Henri Sorvali, and head of audio Pasi Pitkänen – talk about this latest game, which is now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play. They discuss the IP’s use of audio branding, their sonic direction for this new release, creating destruction sounds that aren’t violent, coming up with character voices, designing positive player feedback and reward sounds, creating unique environments for the different levels, working with Audiokinetic Wwise, and more!

Angry Birds Journey – Trailer

The Angry Birds franchise has released over 30 games. Were you able to carry any sounds forward through the different Angry Birds releases?

Senior sound designer Can Uzer

Can Uzer (CU): Audio branding is an integral part of the sound of Angry Birds. We have been building strong guidelines for different categories such as the voice of the birds and piggies, musical themes, and environments. The tone and character of the sound effects we create and the music themes we compose usually revolve around these guidelines. This is an important aspect of working on an IP spanning several video games, movies, and animated series.

All these points aside, AB Journey is a game designed with its own unique style, while still inheriting some characteristics of the Angry Birds universe. It has a softer and more rounded touch overall, both in visual aesthetics and gameplay. Therefore, we wanted to take a similar approach with sound, and to differentiate a bit from other Angry Birds games. This meant that we designed almost all of the sounds from scratch. We inherited some of the sound characteristics, especially the voiceovers, but everything has its own flare unique to Journey, including the sling sounds.

Can you elaborate on your sonic direction for Angry Birds Journey? What’s unique or different about the sound of this game?

CU: Compared to other Angry Birds games, Journey has a more rounded visual style, and the gameplay has a more casual feel to it. The overall feeling of the game is designed to be pleasant and magical. In keeping with this theme, we wanted to differentiate the sound by making it as pleasant as possible, while staying true to the playful aggression etched into the soul of the series. This was a difficult juxtaposition to pull off indeed!

The overall soundscape is glued together with a conservative mixing strategy with the main goal of dynamically making everything a bit smoother.

We moved away from the rebellious Balkan and Slavonic influences in music towards a more introspective and ethereal style. Environments are also tailored to be quite calming and spacious, and are a big part of the soundscape that changes dramatically in each chapter, just like the music.

We also steered away from the wacky cartoon sound effects typical to the classic AB games, and went for a different style which can be called “organic arcade,” a playful, game-like tone that relies more on authentic sounds rather than digital elements. We typically opted for simple percussive sources in a non-tonal way, mixed with subtle but playful sound processing or other interesting layers. We avoided sharp transients, and used detailed and interesting sound tails. The overall soundscape is glued together with a conservative mixing strategy with the main goal of dynamically making everything a bit smoother. I guess it wouldn’t be wrong to call Journey’s sound design choices rather minimalistic.

Toivo Kallio on sound designing an Angry Birds Reloaded cutscene

Henri Sorvali (HS): For the music, the intention was to create a fluffy, almost-dreamlike soundscape that would have an emphasis on themes and melodies while yet not being intrusive or repetitive.

Senior composer Henri Sorvali

To keep the music a bit less predictable, we especially took care of the beginnings of each cue. Every menu and in-game music consists of four different intros which are randomly chosen in order to make sure there is enough variation when the music begins.

On top of that, the in-game music was divided into two layers consisting of “base” and “melody” which gave us the possibility to use them separately for even more variety. We also have a chapter-specific loopable “action layer” with entry and exit cues that are triggered on top of the current music if needed. There are a lot of cool ideas for adaptivity planned already, so I’m already eagerly awaiting to get my hands dirty on those in the future updates!

Angry Birds never sounds violent – even the explosions. Players are encouraged to destroy as much of each setup as possible. What’s your approach to making destruction sound fun and gratifying, without sounding violent?

CU: You are indeed asking about the duality I addressed shortly in the previous question! This was one of the biggest design challenges we had to tackle. For us, the starting point was creating strong design pillars from the get-go and building on top of that. “Toyish” was a keyword we defined early on and stuck with to this day.

“Toyish” was a keyword we defined early on and stuck with to this day.

The classic Angry Birds experience is foremost a physics-based destruction game. Therefore, we started by making the destruction and collision of physical objects in the game sound less aggressive, by giving the sounds a toyish quality. We took some of the physicality away and abstracted the sounds into a more game-like, rounded quality with lots of playfulness.

We applied the same strategy to bigger sounds as well, such as explosions and big flashy effects like character abilities and such. We call this type of sound design “pleasant explosiveness” between us sometimes.

Apart from the more playful and abstract quality of the sounds themselves, we also added subtle implementation details, such as changing sound layers and intensity based on the magnitude of the impact. Additionally, we play a subtle tone that incrementally rises in pitch when you destroy things consecutively. Combined with dynamic mixing that takes the harshness away, we end up with physics sounds that are authentic enough but also rewarding in a playful way without getting too much of your attention.

Can Uzer on creating the Sling Sound for Angry Birds Journey

And what went into creating the destruction or impact sounds of the different blocks and obstacles: jelly blocks, bird cages, snow piles/blocks, glass, wood, stone, chains?

CU: Some of the blocks consist of a few different layers of sounds, whereas some are simple single-source sounds. To give a couple of examples, glass hits consist of two whiskey glasses bumping at each other in a dull way, a bowl hit by a utensil, and a mini djembe hit. They come in varying intensities.

…glass hits consist of two whiskey glasses bumping at each other in a dull way, a bowl hit by a utensil, and a mini djembe hit.

Then there are destruction sounds combining glass and terracotta crashes, which also come in different intensities. There’s also an additional layer of a large crash which is reserved for the biggest of impacts. These were particularly difficult to get right – to sound less destructive – and I had to experiment with lots of different materials to find the right tone.

Then there are wood impact sounds, which are simply done by using a Finnish outdoors party game called Mölkky, a game played by throwing wooden blocks to knock down other wooden blocks (kind of like a woodman’s bowling). More layers of wood cracking and clashing (mostly canned sounds. No pun intended) are added for destruction sounds.

What went into the rewards sounds that come at the end of levels, between levels, when collecting/opening boxes, and getting stars?

Toivo Kallio (TK): There’s a certain upbeat and lightweight “airy” spirit to Journey. The world is slightly more magical and much more impressionistic than what the Angry Birds games have usually sounded like.

Sound designer Toivo Kallio

I used quite a bit of my own vocal sounds with the UI in general, with layering together soft whistles, mouth plops, and breaths. Then I dug around in the sound effect libraries and found sounds with natural origins but some added “magic” in them, such as slightly processed wind gusts or other whooshes. Also, some tonal and melodic jingle instruments were used.

We also had a big selection of fresh character vocals from SIDE Global to play with, so I created some lovely reaction group vocals for receiving rewards and such, like the Birds saying “Wow” in unison, for example.
 
 
 

CU: Most of the UI sounds were done by Toivo, but a few transition sounds I did featured breathy vocal layers, some percussions (like a seashell shaker I bought from Istanbul that was used a lot in this game) and tasty reverb and delay effects by Valhalla DSP.

I used quite a bit of my own vocal sounds with the UI in general, with layering together soft whistles, mouth plops, and breaths.

Transitions in general are one of the hardest things to get right in my opinion. When they are done right, the whole game feels much smoother, and we spent a good deal of time polishing them. There is a lot of ducking, fading, and state changes going on in the background. I guess a transition is like a bass player—it will make or break your track!

HS: We decided to have every single small cue and stinger to be specifically tailored to the current chapter the player is in instead of settling for the generic “one-size-fits-all” approach. For this, it was important to keep them all in the corresponding musical key and use the chapter-specific instrumentation for each in order to make them familiar and recognizable throughout the chapters, yet clearly belonging to the same world where the player currently is.

Can you talk about the character sounds and vocalizations? How many sounds do you have for each character? How does the game determine which character sounds to play in a given moment?

Head of audio Pasi Pitkänen

Pasi Pitkänen (PP): We decided early on that we want to cast the main flock of birds with new voice talent and not use any of the old voice content since the characters are visually and age-wise very different from previous games. We collaborated with SIDE Global and at first, sent them detailed character briefs so they could then send the first batches of voice talent auditions for us to review. After some careful consideration and reviewing, we managed to cast all the main flock characters with these amazing voice talents:

David Menkin as Red
Taylor Clarke-Hill as Chuck
Andrew James Spooner as Bomb
Claire Morgan as Silver
Kosha Engler as Stella

Next up were the recording sessions which we attended virtually through Zoom. Everybody at SIDE Global – and especially voice director Nimer Rashed – did an amazing job with the voice casting, recording, and directing so that we would get everything out of the amazing voice talent.

These recording sessions were really fun to do and we always left the sessions with a constant happy grin on our faces. For each character, we booked a 2-hour session in which the first hour was used to cover all the game-specific emotes and actions, and the other hour was used to record ‘character identity’ emotes and actions.

There are two states for each main character in the game: Normal and Angered.

Our ‘character identity’ template consists of roughly 45+ emotes and actions that cover pretty much everything the character could do in a game, animation, or somewhere else. This is a nice way to grow our character voice-over catalog and also make sure that the voice of the character is consistent – be it in the game, marketing ad, user acquisition video, etc.

There are two states for each main character in the game: Normal and Angered. We wanted to create a contrast between these states so that the player would definitely know when a bird would be in a normal or angered state. So for each character and their events in the game (launch from slingshot, activate ability, etc.), we recorded separate voices for the angered state. This gives the player a more rewarding feeling when they are popping those pigs, achieving the level goals, and in general destroying the level objects.

TK: For the player-controlled Birds, the amount of total vocal assets per character is somewhere between 35 and 40 (for 8 different VO events per character – things like launching, ability activation, colliding, jumping, etc.), when you count all the variations. My aim for all the characters is usually 5 variations per event.

The fact that a Bird can both get launched and perform its ability in either normal or Angered state increases the amount of VO assets as well – both of those events have to have both versions available. Then there’s the sound effect side as well – all the Birds have their unique ability sound events which means 35 individual SFX assets total. Most ability SFX also have Angered versions of them and thatincreases the required amount of assets.

I found a nice tone with the Speakerphone plugin that I used to make these silly giggles and collision yells for the three Piggies that are inside the piñata, trying to keep a low profile but failing miserably.

The so-called “obstacle characters” usually have a much more limited selection of events. For example, a Frog character has a total of 16 vocal assets in 5 different events. The goal is, of course, to make the obstacle character vocals and sounds as clear in intention and information as possible. The player should be able to tell what’s happening with the characters even without looking at the screen; that’s my main goal at least.

For me, one of the most fun characters to sound design in AB Journey is the Pig Piñata. It’s like a multi-layered character. First, there’s a suspicious Piggy-looking piñata, which then blasts open when damaged enough and three regular Piggies tumble out. The way I designed the vocal presence of the Piñata form was to use the AudioEase Speakerphone 2 plugin. There are these wonderful convolution presets available in it that emulate the sound source being inside an object like a tin can, a bread maker, a glass jar, etc. I found a nice tone with the Speakerphone plugin that I used to make these silly giggles and collision yells for the three Piggies that are inside the piñata, trying to keep a low profile but failing miserably.

Angry Birds Journey – Pig Pinata DAW Session Breakdown with Toivo

CU: There can be lots of characters in a given level at a time. We have different priority levels for each character that affects its place in the mix. Every character-action is not the same either; some have higher priority than others (for example, destruction has higher priority than collision because it’s more important information to convey). Similarly, collision is more important than a character idling in the background.

On top of all that, we have conservative playback limitation settings, such as limiting how often a character can play a specific sound, or how probable it is to play it. This way we can avoid overloading the scene with a cacophony of voices. Last but not least, we paid ample attention to stopping the previous sound a character makes if there is a newer sound, so they don’t overlap.

 
[tweet_box]Creating an Aural Adventure for ‘Angry Birds Journey'[/tweet_box]

What about the sounds of the ‘boosters’ like chilling wind, ducking rain, and flower sprouts? What was your sonic approach to these?

CU: The approach for these sounds were similar to the overall approach of keeping it minimal, organic, and playful. Natural elements are present in these sounds with the addition of some fun layers. One important aspect of these sounds is how they take over the mix with a special state to stand out from everything else.

In retrospect, I think supporting these elements with a special musical element could have been a nice touch. Maybe for a future update :)

There is also the Anger Meter, which, when full, allows players to supersize their bird. How did you help to support this sonically?

CU: The Anger Meter simply informs the player when it’s full with a distinct, iconic sound, and has a juicy effect when it’s used. The birds respond to it quite vocally, and it also causes the sling sounds to become intensified.

We didn’t want to play a sound when the meter is being filled, as this happens too often, and we wanted to avoid cluttering the scene.

What was your approach to the five different chapters in the game? How do you make each chapter sonically distinct?

CU: We aimed to make every environment feel unique with distinct sound characteristics. There’s a limited amount of visual information visible to the player in each chapter, and that gave us more freedom to paint the ambience with various “off-screen” sounds.

For example, the first chapter, The Ancient Ruins, features calm sea waves and spring birds, whereas the following chapter, The Crystal Mountains, is distinguished by an airy atmosphere with bright details and long echoes. The next chapter is identified with a soothing desert breeze and occasional wind gusts and desert animals.

Every chapter has its own sonic focal point, and even though the ambiences are fully 2D, there’s lots of randomization and modulation going on to keep them interesting through time. We also paid attention to create as much contrast as possible from one chapter to the next with the use of different sound types.

Every chapter has its own sonic focal point, and even though the ambiences are fully 2D, there’s lots of randomization and modulation going on to keep them interesting through time.

Last but not least, ambience elements are carefully selected to sonically complement the music of the given chapter.

HS: From a musical perspective, every chapter has a unique theme and a certain tonal palette. The chapter-specific approach is always combined with certain predefined musical elements found in each chapter in order to keep the soundtrack cohesive. This allows each chapter to have a musical connection to each other despite their individual stylistic variations.

It always starts first with finding the general musical direction and style of the world and planning the sonic palette. The main backbone has been wind instruments due to the airy and lightweight mechanics and graphical aspects of the game and each chapter always utilizes woodwinds in one form or another.

The main backbone has been wind instruments due to the airy and lightweight mechanics and graphical aspects of the game…

For some chapters, I wanted to keep the mood a bit more energetic while for some I went for a more laid-back and even mellow route, also taking notes on what sort of music the player had recently heard whenever a new chapter is being composed. Every chapter usually has a certain lead instrument and/or “hook” making it sonically unique and setting the scene, and it’s usually backed up with certain sounds found everywhere in the music.

As the music is supposed to set the mood and generally be more felt than heard, a great deal of work went to find percussive sounds that weren’t necessarily intrusive or aggressive while still providing the needed movement for certain parts. And in some ways, the music may even be more reminiscent of an open-world MMO soundtrack than a slingshot mobile game every now and then, which is a completely conscious decision by design.

How was using Audiokinetic Wwise helpful in creating the sound of Angry Birds Journey?

CU: Wwise gave us the opportunity to make the sound more dynamic and responsive in many different ways. A typical mobile game is usually very static in terms of sound: A game event happens, and a sound plays as a response. With a tool like Wwise, it’s been convenient for us to add more dynamism to these responses without too much coding work or performance hit. So, there’s really no excuse to not take advantage of such capabilities, and AB Journey being a mobile game is definitely not an acceptable excuse for those of us in the Rovio audio team.

There’s lots of movement and variation happening based on how much or fast the sling is pulled, how long it has been in the pulled state, and whether or not the angered mode is active.

I mentioned earlier that the ambiences are modified by randomized behavior. For example, the pitch, low-pass filter, and volume of the overall ambience is very slowly modulated. Over the course of a few minutes (depending on whatever random seed is defined per parameter), these values will drift. One-shot ambience layers are sent to the reverb bus in random values using envelopes, which are also tied to filter and volume parameters. Additionally, the ambience plays at a louder volume when entering a level to set the scene, then slowly reduced in time to get out of the way.

On the gameplay side, we use game parameters throughout the actor-mixer hierarchy to create responsive behaviors. A good example of this is the sling cart. It’s a central element in the game, so we put lots of detail into it. There’s lots of movement and variation happening based on how much or fast the sling is pulled, how long it has been in the pulled state, and whether or not the angered mode is active. These parameters define what kind of samples are played in blend containers, as well as modifying volume and filtering via RTPC’s, both for pulling and releasing sound events. This is a good example of how to create a dynamic system with rich behavior, as opposed to using static sound events.

Another big part of our Wwise setup is the way we make use of states, RTPC’s, and ducking features to manipulate the mix on both macro and micro levels. The master-mixer hierarchy is mostly responsible for broad changes with the use of RTPC’s, auto-ducking and state-based mixing, such as popup states or scene states.

Another big part of our Wwise setup is the way we make use of states, RTPC’s, and ducking features to manipulate the mix on both macro and micro levels.

Actor-mixer hierarchy also uses these features, but on a narrower scope.

There are also utility events we sometimes use to solve edge cases without manipulating the code. For example, a sound event might be triggered redundantly due to a contingent game logic that would be rather complicated to solve but can be easily overcome by using Wwise events to suppress that sound.

In terms of your sound work on Angry Birds Journey, how has this project helped you personally to improve your craft?

CU: AB Journey has been the first globally-launched project I worked on at Rovio as an audio lead from start to finish, and it’s one of the more collaborative projects on which we all participated as a team. It gave me lots of opportunities to improve on my collaboration, communication, management, and leading skills.

Apart from that, conceptualizing the style and the tone of this project was challenging due to how different it is compared to other games in the series. This was yet another opportunity to improve on my broad-stroke audio design skills.

I also took a considerable role on the implementation side, and it taught me a ton on how to utilize Wwise and Unity in combination in a more efficient and collaborative way.

It taught me to be more confident with my sound design, to use fewer sources and processing; I sincerely enjoy that.

On a sound design level, I think it steered my design perspective to a more minimal dimension. It taught me to be more confident with my sound design, to use fewer sources and processing; I sincerely enjoy that.

Last but not least, having responsibilities in so many areas of a game while having to make sure all goes by the plan has helped me to be less perfectionistic, and more decisive in knowing when a task is done and when it actually needs more polish. Knowing how to identify priorities and attacking matters that will make the bigger difference in the final product, while settling with less grand (but still satisfactory) solutions on lower priorities is a really useful skill to develop.

Overall, I feel that it helped me level up in many ways in my journey (pun intended) to become a better game audio designer and a better collaborator.

HS: From a musical (and technical) perspective, I treat every project as something that will improve my craft. Sometimes it’s about composing something I’ve never done before; sometimes it’s all about taking the arrangement to a new level, or sometimes I’m obsessed with a certain productional direction.

Learning and developing my skills is the driving force for me and the absolute backbone in everything I do…

Learning and developing my skills is the driving force for me and the absolute backbone in everything I do and Angry Birds Journey was no exception, as I always want to “up my own game” even only on a personal level.

Due to the ongoing development process of the game, I decided quite early to operate completely “in the box” which made the process a bit more challenging in a way, but also opened a lot of new doors on other things. This proved especially useful as time went on, as when coming back to the first songs before global launch I realized that there was still a lot of work to do with the sample library choices and the mix in general in order to achieve what I wanted.

I’ve always used to mix in audio, use as many real instruments as possible, and usually even master through analog gear so working with Journey has been an interesting approach to try out other methods as well. I don’t particularly enjoy mixing in MIDI; I’ve always found the visual waveforms much more uncomplicated to observe, edit, and especially predict. But as the process was constantly evolving it was impossible to commit to certain decisions from the start which is also the main reason I didn’t use any real instruments in the soundtrack.

In some ways, the reverbs became so important in the production process that I could almost list one of the main instruments of the soundtrack as “Lexicon,” hah!

With Journey, one of the more clear goals in my mind was to reach the sound and level of production quality I wanted. The goal was something I referred to as “audio pillow” – something that would be soft and fluffy, yet clear and twirlingly reverberant while still not overly “washed.”

In some ways, the reverbs became so important in the production process that I could almost list one of the main instruments of the soundtrack as “Lexicon,” hah!

TK: For me, Journey has been a wonderful challenge; the whole aesthetic of this game is so different from the usual and classic approach of Angry Birds that it needed a fresh thought process to everything we did. It certainly made me think about sound for animation in a new way – especially the subtle approach I took when designing the UI. That was enjoyable to find and fine-tune, after some actual struggling with it. It’s always fun to step out of your comfort zone to actually try new things.

ANGRY BIRDS JOURNEY AUDIO TEAM:
Audio Lead: Can Uzer; Sound Designers: Can Uzer, Toivo Kallio, Pasi Pitkänen; Composer: Henri Sorvali; Audio Programmers: Mikko Kolehmainen, Osmo Suvisaari; Voice Talents: David Menkin as Red, Taylor Clarke-Hill as Chuck, Andrew James Spooner as Bomb, Claire Morgan as Silver, Kosha Engler as Stella, Toivo Kallio, Antti LJ Pääkkönen, Ana Krmek, Can Uzer. Powered by Wwise 2006 – 2022 Audiokinetic Inc. All rights reserved.

A big thanks to Can Uzer, Toivo Kallio, Henri Sorvali, and Pasi Pitkänen for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Angry Birds Journey and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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