Elemental weapons provide a twist to combat in RPGs, by channelling the power of natural elements such as fire, ice, lightning, etc. In this post, we will see how to design sounds that match the visual effects associated with these weapons, all in Atom Craft.

Assets creation

First, we need to create several layers, both for the sounds of the basic weapon and for its elemental components. For each of the layers, we will need several variations as well. In our example, we made a sword sound that is composed of two layers:

• Sword Hit
• Sword Whoosh

Then, we created some whoosh sound effects for the following elements:

• Fire
• Electricity
• Ice
• Water

Of course, feel free to create whooshes for other elements, as required by your game.

Once the assets are ready, drag and drop everything into your Materials folder.

Implementation

First, we create a Cue for our sword.

• Create a new Polyphonic Cue.
• Add the tracks that correspond to your weapon sounds, in our case one for the Hit and one for the Whoosh.
• Then, add one track for each elemental layer (four in our case).

With our tracks ready, we can now move our assets in the Cue:

• In each track, create a Sub Sequence of type Shuffle.
• Drag and drop the Materials for each layer in its corresponding Sub Sequence.
• Move the Sword Hit Sub Sequence on the timeline to start at about 700 ms (depending on the length of the whoosh).
• Open the List Editor and adjust the Volume Random Range and the Pitch Random Range properties to your liking in order to add more variations.

 
At this stage, if you play the Cue all the tracks will play together. We need a way to always play the Sword Whoosh and Hit sounds, but to play the elemental sounds selectively. To achieve this, we can use a feature of the Polyphonic Cue that allows us to use a Selector on its tracks.

• On the Project Tree, add a new “Element” Selector in the Selector Folder.
• Add a Selector Label for each of your elements: Fire, Electric, Ice, and Water in our case.
• Add a None label to allow the elemental power of the weapon to be disabled.
• Finally, in your Weapon Cue, assign the Selector Labels to the appropriate tracks.

While testing your Cue in the Session window, you can switch the Selector value, allowing for different elements to play along with the original sword strike. In the same way, in your game, if your weapon has an elemental effect activated, you can simply switch to the appropriate selector label.

You can test it by yourself in the demo project below.