So Gross!
My name's Phil.
I'm Tom and we're from Cedar Studios and we've done
all things audio for Two Point Hospital.
"At Two Point Hospital, over 52% of our patients
believe they leave healthier than when they arrived. Our precisely calibrated equipment
is operated by compassionate healthcare practitioners, many of whom have even been to medical school
or watched ER." Two Point Hospital is a hospital simulation
game, you're kind of building your hospital empire and you're basically spinning loads
of plates, trying to make sure you're not killing to many people while rinsing them
for a profit basically. But yeah for Two Point Hospital we did the
sound effects, music, ambience, voice over, anything that you hear has gone through us
in someway or form basically. With the sound effects when we first started
this project, we were like "let's do everything ourselves, we're not going to use any samples
or sound effects, we're going to do it all original." and that was part of our pitch
for them, like we're going to do it all bespoke for you, and we ended up seeing the machines
they were making and we were like "I wish we'd never said that", some of them they are
huge as well, you'd have to go to factories cos of the size of these machines. I mean
the good thing about this project is that we've had the build and that gets updated
everyday because people are always adding to it, and we didn't get given like "here's
some footage, make some sounds", it was like "here's the game, play it, what do you think
sounds good". So we'd be clicking on things thinking that could do with a sound, or that
sounds too loud, or that machine sounds too scary. There were a lot of things though that
in the game you don't want to sound to cartoony like the doors for instance, like you can't
really get a different door sound. We tried, we did try to make it a bit funny, but you
can't really, a door is a door. So there are some sound effects that just are what you
see. There's a machine called Chromatherapy where
the patient goes in, he's got greys anatomy, he hasn't got any colour, so he goes into
this machine and it spins these three paint colours round and just sprays paint on them.
Like an Essex spray tan. Yeah kind of like a spray tan thing, and there's a curtain backdrop
which the paint also hits so we ended up messing with loads of stuff and I think the final
one we used was yogurt blowing through a straw into an umbrella. So we had a mic set up here
on the floor with Phil, blowing loads of yogurt. Pretty gross.
Yeah we kind of layered it up, we had like just blowing through the straws which gave
you the airy sound. Then we had the yogurt spraying out, and then we had the yogurt onto
the umbrella which kind of sounded like the curtain that they have on the back of the
machine. You got this big guy, have more...
Oh man this is like torture. The machines, because they are so ridiculous
it was trying to make them less realistic at some points. It's like how can we make
this more silly. Yeah a lot of the first stuff we did, did sound a bit too real for the game
and a bit scary, and when we looked back on it, we were like it is a bit too gritty. Yeah
there is this man with this Cubism disease gets dropped in this meat grinder and that
sounds a bit gory and then we ended up changing it to be more of like a bubbling, more of
a silly thing again. Sound design wise it goes from like musical
machines to an MRI scanner. Yeah there is an MRI scanner which you contacted the animator
didn't you, just like how can we make this funny, it's an MRI machine its pretty serious,
what did he say? I think he said that some things just aren't funny and that's funny
in itself. So it's quite nice having a mummy machine and then next door is just this MRI
scanner, it's kind of this weird juxtaposition that kind of makes it funny.
The closest we got to like an actual brief was an elevator jukebox kind of feel. So there's
loads of different styles. Because there's a radio DJ in the game, they wanted it to
sound like songs but also not have vocals in, but still quite backgroundy too. So they
didn't have to loop which is quite nice because most games you have to have looping tracks,
tracks that will last 10-12 minutes, but for this they're not any longer than 3-4 minutes,
same as like an average radio song. We kind of started on guitar, sometimes to
be fair we'd start by writing a little piano riff and then put it into Logic, add our own
percussion elements. Most of the percussion in the game is actually all recorded. That's
all recorded real yeah, there's bongos, we've got claves, what else? Sorry I touched your
knee. Tom's knee! Yeah maybe actually we do have some percussive claps and stuff in there.
We would reference the guitars quite a lot to get a guide track down first. So we would
record that live, and then maybe we'd turn that into a weird organ, it's kind of our
theme throughout the game. So I made the PolyPipes instrument, it's made
with PVC bathroom pipes, so we made that instrument and then we sampled it just so we could play
it on the keyboard and you could get a wider range of octaves with that. We recorded it
with ASP880 over there, just had two overheads on it and then one SM57 just on the actual
hits, and the bottom of the pipe as well, and then it was like 2000 samples of that,
just that instrument. Having to hit it at each velocity as well, so like really softly,
slightly harder, like 5 or 6 times for each velocity. It took a while, and it was kind
of a weird thing to do but it actually does sound really cool and it paid off really well.
That ended up on a track called Night Ward, and it's kind of the bass line, and it's got
a bit of a lead melody to it as well. With the ambience in the game, we actually
recorded it in quite a few locations so we had the trees were done here in Guildford,
we did a beach in Spain which Phill went out while we were all drinking and decided to
go and record a beach on his own, dedicated! Yep about 1030-11 at night, came out great.
everyone was wondering where Phil walked off with his microphone. And then we went to Scotland
as well and got a nice river, babbling brook ambience. Not all for this, they didn't pay
us to do this, but... I wish they did, but no, everything you hear in this game is from
a real location which we recorded, which is quite cool. Yeah that's true, we went to Surrey
Hospital as well to record some background mumble, ambience stuff, and I ended up going
in the wrong ward. Yeah the Gynaecology ward isn't the best place to bring a microphone...
Yeah so I was like "Tom Tom, this looks like the right amount of people here, lets go in
there!"and then you were like "wait wait wait! This isn't the ward you need to be in Phil!"
We didn't record the gynaecology ward, that's not in the game, it's just a lot of cafe ambience
really. "This is Ricky Hawthorn on Two Point Radio!"
There's quite a few aspects of voiceover in this game, you've got the DJ lines which is
this radio show which is constantly going on. You've got the tannoy lady who's constantly
telling you little cues to like, you need to check out this room, and also the little
people in the game, they all have little sounds if you zoom in you can hear. They're basically
all Tom, mostly! So if you pick up anyone from the game, it's going to be me going like
"Ooooh". We went to their offices, Two Point Studio
offices, and recorded quite a few staff members as well for like little emotive sounds. The
little people kind of interact with each other at certain points so sometimes they're flirting
with each other or sometimes they're angry so you've got loads of different varied voices
attached to each character, which is quite cool. We just made it a little detail if you
really zoom in you can hear these little interactions between people. The only time that you can
really, that they really stand out you can hear them is when they're on the toilets,
because toilets are funny. With the tannoy lines as well, we had the
voice actor for that coming in here and she was set up in the other room, it was over
a few sessions because there was so much to get through. But that was all done here and
then afterwards we kind of just had to smash all that lovely recording up with a nice,
shrill, horrible tannoy effect anyway. "Unattended patients may be removed and destroyed"
"Unattended patients may be removed and destroyed" And then the DJ radio was recorded with Marc
Silk, who's a a really talented voice actor. Yeah he's done Johnny Bravo, Scooby Doo, Danger
Mouse. He has his own studio so he recorded it there and then they'd send us over the
files and we'd have to go through and cut up the best takes and put them in the game.
Each DJ has a different style as well, it's kind of like...
"This is Ricky Hawthorn" "You're listening to Harrison Wolf"
"Sir Nigel Bickleworth" He also did all the radio adverts as well.
The adverts are so crazy and random anyway, they were all completely different, and we
tried to mix them up a bit. "Eat some Cheesy Gubbins. Cheesy Gubbins,
the snack for people with nothing to lose!" They're quite infrequent so it's almost like
a nice little surprise when you get one. There was one advert that was recorded, it was like
a fake popstar in this world the've made, and we got this really talented singer called
Sophie Worsley to actually like sing, we gave her the lyrics they'd written and just to
like sing this melody we gave her and she just completely smashed it. Yeah it's called
'Nice Smelling Face' and 'Fish Whispers'. "Fish Whispers well that's all I can hear..."
With the UI at the start, we tried to do it all real world sounds, didn't we. Then we
did a rehaul like a couple of months ago and we fell into this bubbly kind of poppy bank
of sounds. I think we ended up going, the UI sounds like its all from this different
space, lets bring it all back together and make them all sound related. So like with
the pop, we ended up just having this really nice, satisfying plunger pop or something,
and we ended up wacking it in EXS24 and just use that, and we would make, when you place
a room and build it it's like a satisfying kind of wobble as it pops up.
Say a machine has about, I don't know, 20 sounds on it, we needed to cut down each individual
part of the machine and split them up because there's different speeds in the game, you
can go slow, normal time and sped up, so yeah we needed to cut them down into small pieces
so when we implement them, when you speed up the game it doesn't sound like anything
has really changed, just the pace of it. It's almost like you have hitpoints for a machine
so instead of having just one audio file for a machine animation, we have like 'Door Open',
'Door Hit', 'Door Close', 'Door Close Hit', you implement it almost to the animation and
you tie these hitpoints of sounds to the exact point, so that when it is sped up it will
always stick there. But that was like the trickiest thing sound implementation wise.
We implemented it all just straight into Unity, we didn't have any middleware in this project
so it was just us, the coders and just us annoying coders basically, like "we need this.
We need this." Yeah, but the coders have been really helpful about it so it was pretty easy
once we got like a good dialogue going with them. Yeah.
When we upload the sounds, you can kind of change basic things like volume and like radius
on where they can be heard, so we could tweak as much as we could in Unity like once we
had the sounds made, and we set them all at about a set level and then tweaked it from
there. The game is out now so check it out if you
are interested, it is really fun and I'm not just saying it because... I'm paid to. It's
definitely worth getting and having a look at. Especially if you love those old sim management
games, this is going to be right up your street. Yeah definitely.
Yeah thanks to Audient for coming down to Cedar Studios to see how we did the sounds
for Two Point Hospital. Come again whenever you want. Whenever you want!