If the Overworld is somewhat like naturalistic or realistic like in its feel and soundscape, the Nether is the alien dimension. Things don’t sound natural or realistic at all in the Nether. [OMINOUS SOUNDSCAPE] The Warped Forest is a really like weird biome. Something in the forest really Like disrupts reality. I can’t really tell you what’s going on. I don’t think even music can play in the Warped Forest. I don’t know, but maybe the Enderman can tell you what’s up. [OMINOUS SOUNDS] The Crimson Forest – an easter egg for creating this sounds is that most of them Because it creates a like a disturbing feeling of something that is like stretching and forcing itself to bend. [CREAKING SOUNDS] So the Soul Sand Valley, I would say like this biome is really ghostly, and if you listen closely maybe you’ll hear what the souls are trying to tell you. [GHOSTLY SOUNDSCAPE] When you design ambience for a certain biome or place in a game, you always start with nothing. You have the visuals and then you have to fill it in with sound. And when it comes to the Basalt Deltas I was a bit confused about Interpreting the visuals, so when Brandon came up with a keyword “radiation” I suddenly knew what I was looking at, and therefore could interpret it into sound. [POST-APOCALYPTIC SOUNDSCAPE] With the new Nether music, we looked at each of the individual biomes and we Decided you know which, which biome felt right for the music piece. However, we didn’t have a piece for the Basalt Deltas, so what I did is I played all the music allowed and then we kind of sat down and we thought you know which Piece of music out of what we had would fit this one the best. We all discussed it for a while, and in the end we chose the same sounds that plays for the Soul Sand Valley, the same piece of music. [MUSIC] Players now associate that track with the spookiness that we have for the Soul Sand Valley, and they kind of see that it blends well the creepiness of the Basalt Deltas, with the overarching pillars. With the Warped Forest biome however, we decided to Specifically have no music at all, players left with just the ambient sounds. They have to consider the environment around them, they don’t have any of the emotion that we tried to give them with music anymore. That’s to try and communicate the strangeness of the forest and the strange materials around them, and The very foreign environments. I saw one comment from a fan that was quite interesting, it was, “Surely we just drop music into the game, that shouldn’t be so hard you know?” but selecting the tracks, and finding where they should go, and even finding where in The code how they should play, that’s quite a lot of work. And I spent a lot of time looking at how the biomes should have individual tracks and seeing how each could remove the dependency on what world you’re in, what dimension you’re in, and how you’re playing the game, Creative or In Survival mode, all that was mixed together with the music. We really had to tease out all the details and unwind this spider web that we created. I’ve voiced many mobs in Minecraft since I started in the 1.9 update, witch to Shulker to Piglin, different Illagers. And it’s always a different approach to them. We knew from the get-go that the Piglins should have a base of pig. So I went to a place south of Stockholm to record some pigs. It was like an old Swedish type of farmyard swine, I think is the word, and they were extremely chill and boring, very like monotonous. So in the game later it ended up using like only a small part of those recordings and I voiced the rest myself. [PIGLIN NOISES] When Brandon showed me the Striders for the first time in-game they made me think of some sort of alien insect or frog, or something like that. So at that moment I took a toy from my son, which i think is called like a Click Clack Hedgehog, and it makes this cute clicking noises and when you spin it around it’s like [clicking sounds]. I combined that with my voice to put some more emotion into it, and there was the sounds for the Strider. [STRIDER SOUNDS] We tried to make sure that the sound experience for the Nether is the same no matter where you play Minecraft and how you play Minecraft. One of the more difficult aspects would be the actual sound files themselves, depending on which platforms we were targeting. It’s all very well, we can make a very Massive sound library we can have thousands of thousands of sounds just playing the Nether in every single biome, but that’s not going to work on every platform. You have to target the very bottom end and the very top end no matter where you want to play Minecraft. All these different devices expect different Audio formats, and they say we can’t play this many channels of audio, there’s all sorts of things to consider. So we had to try and pick the best sounds, we just reduced a number of them and we made sure they’re the right percentage chance for something to play. I think a general misconception about creating sounds for video games is that people think you’re either working with music, or you’re like a sound engineer. The interesting part for me is the design and the creative output of making these things from nothing into something that is really impactful for the players. Video Information
This video, titled ‘Dev Diaries #2: Nether Sound’, was uploaded by Minecraft on 2020-07-24 15:00:05. It has garnered 944921 views and 37797 likes. The duration of the video is 00:06:31 or 391 seconds.
In this edition of Minecraft Dev Diaries we take a closer look, or rather listen, to the sounds of the Nether. Find out how the Nether differs from the naturalistic tones of the Overworld, the individual sounds for each biome, when we chose to use music to create a spooky atmosphere and when no music at all makes it even spookier.