Wwise - Advanced Footstep System, 2023

Elevating Your Game with an Innovative Footstep Foley System in Wwise.

Introduction

Footstep systems have been increasingly used in modern games, for good reason. Not only do these systems help the player feel more immersed as their character interacts with the virtual environment, aiding in world building, it can also provide information to the player about the character's condition. For example: Is the character running, walking, injured? Maybe you might want to convey to the player the character's weight. I created this footstep foley system for a recent game project and I think it will be interesting to share with you.

The Set Up

For this setup, the containers that will be used starting from the top of the hierarchy will be a switch group container which will parent the other containers, the switch group container will represent the type of shoe/boot that is being used. This switch group container will contain the switches, these switches are related to the material surfaces that you require for your project.

Secondly you will need two blend containers, one will act as the blend container for running and the other blend container will be for walking. In terms of audio assets, use as many footsteps sounds as you would like but I would recommend at least 12 of each heel and toe.

Thirdly and lastly, in each blend container, add two random containers, one for the heel and the toe of your footsteps. The

Container Reasoning

The reason the heel/toe is split into different random containers, is for a multitude of reasons, for example, the built in initial delay of the random containers allows the sound designer to edit the delay between the heel and the toe without the need of code, another reason is that it also has the added benefit of creating a much higher number of possible variations. For example, if you have 12 heels and toe SFX put within their corresponding random containers, you can create up to 144 possible variations of footsteps. Just imagine what would be possible with utilizing a higher number than 12 footstep SFX!

Character weight change

With the setup complete, this next method will advance the footstep system even further by allowing the footsteps to be adjusted by weight using:

• Pitch

• Low-pass

• Volume

This allows the same system to not only be applied to the playable character in the game but also the NPCs as well. It would also help if the game is in early development and the playable character's visuals and attributes aren't decided yet, so the system can be quickly adjusted and modified to fit an unforeseen change within development.

To begin this change, add an RTPC called weight. as well as a game parameter with a similar name, then add a pitch, and low-pass curve to the RTPC. You can also adjust the RTPC volume to work together with this, for example: The lower pitch the sound becomes, the sound becomes louder so the higher pitch the sound becomes, the sound gets more quieter. This method allows you to use the footstep system but with a twist, it can now be applied to other NPCs within the game. You can then adjust these RTPCs using the game parameter in engine.

Material Layer

To add more to this system, having some "extra sauce" will help push it further, for this we will need material layers. These will be things like wood creaks to add to the footstep materials, making that specified footstep material more believable and breath some life into it.

First thing to use is a switch group container as the parent. Create switches for the corresponding switches then create a blend container for that material. Within each blend container add a random container. You can also create a sound source with it being set to silence to add to the variation.

Triggering

These switches and sounds can be triggered at certain hotspot within your level, one method I use is using collision boxes that when the player walks into them, triggers the sound at the same time as the footstep.

Conclusion

We have went through this adaptive footstep system I have made recently and the benefits it has. It is defiantly useful I believe for not only early development but also having uses in the final game with the system being able to be used by multiple characters (NPCs). I hope you've learned something interesting by checking out my blog. Thanks for reading!