Hi-Rez Studios stands tall as one of our most cherished partners. Our journey together has been adorned with numerous projects, each a testament to the creative alliance between our two studios. From the thunderous arenas of Divine Knockout (DKO) to the fantastical realms of Paladins, they have provided us with many interesting projects to work on over the years.

Yet, it's with SMITE, the ever-evolving battleground of deities, that Demute's melody found its most enduring resonance. We take a moment to reflect on the project and delve into the intricacies of crafting audio for the ever-evolving character roster of the SMITE universe.

How we help bring their vision to life

We have a close working relationship with Kellen Malone, who is the Audio Manager for SMITE at Hi-Rez, and has become a close friend over the many years of working together. There are 15 new skins being pumped out for the game every single month, which is a monumental task, so they rely on outsourcing the sound design for many of them to studios like ours. The new gods are still handled by SMITE's internal audio team, but because we've been building a relationship of trust with each other and know exactly how the other party works, Demute has been promoted to handling the most high-profile skins.

Our task is to conjure the sounds that breathe life into SMITE's virtual world. For this title, that means creating the best-fitting sound design for each divine character skin that gets assigned to us, while still keeping in mind the base God's powers and abilities. After all, professional players count on these sounds during their gameplay and it is vital to their success and enjoyment.

Implementing the sounds into the game is always handled by the internal team at Hi-Rez, but we have clear assignments on the format of the exports and have co-developed tools and workflows to automate part of the process.

With a game like SMITE, this means constantly looking for the perfect sound effect, as each character skin we get to work on is vastly different from the one before it. Sometimes we have to look at the source material, because we don't have the actual audiofiles from the IP we're working with, like when you play as the Demogorgon from Stranger Things or use Eleven's psychic powers, but we have the show to watch and get inspired by. Other times, we'll get the resource soundfiles from the original studio, like when we worked on the Runescape collaboration.

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Each sound designer develops their own little preferences, whether they want to or not, and Kellen even takes this into account when deciding which skins to assign to someone in our team, and we truly believe that's wonderful!

To give an example: Recently, our Lead Sound Designer Karlo Radman got to work on the Magic The Gathering collaboration and create the magical sound effects for Planeswalkers like Jace or Chandra, which was especially dear to him as he used to love playing the collectable card game himself.

Working together

It's funny how our collaboration with Hi-Rez started as a lucky coincidence. They were seeking a solution to recording a video of a Belgian Winner for one of their events, and somehow stumbled upon Demute. What started as a quest for a recording solution, transformed into a long-lasting collaboration.

This eventually led to us developing a close friendship with their audio Manager, Kellen Malone, who even joined us for a talk at Meet & Build in Belgium and worked from our office for a few days. And in March 2023 our very own Pablo Schwilden Diaz got to share the stage with him at GDC 2023, where they did a joint talk titled "How to Release 15 Skins a Month Without Losing Your Mind".

In the talk, Kellen mentioned how that much volume of content would be an impossible task for their own team to handle, and that's how we like to see ourselves: as an extension of the internal audio team!

Careful planning of every milestone and delivery is vital to a project like this, and it can't be overstated how great it is to work for a client that even keeps potential holidays and sickness into account, so assets can still be delivered on time. But with a title as important to our studio as this one, we are even willing to temporarily pull people from less urgent projects to meet any deadlines.

"Demute has delivered excellent audio for our games! They are a joy to work with, are great with feedback and quick with deliveries. We appreciate having them as an extension to our internal audio team here at Hi-Rez."
- Andrea Chang, Executive Producer, Hi-Rez Studio

Working on the ever-evolving roster of characters

There are various jobs the team gets to work on for SMITE, from crafting the audio for the collaboration introduction trailers to making sure that each character has all the proper emotes and sound effects, which can vary depending on who you're working with. If a character walks around, you need to make their footsteps sound great, but if they fly or float, that doesn't apply. Some will have projectiles that sprout magical plants and others need a more direct melee impact.

Typically, the Demute team receives a description of each attack or other sound needed, with images and videos to accompany them. The team then puts those sounds on the exact keyframes in the video to have a perfect idea of what it'll sound like in the game, without implementing it themselves, as that is still a task handled by the internal team at Hi-Rez.

There are many complexities that come with making sound design specifically for skins. Our team needs to make sure the sounds are perfectly aligned with the new skin's theme, it needs to sound engaging, but at the same time maintain a homogeneity with the rest of the game, and most importantly that it is combined with the reference sound design in such a way that the key gameplay cues are still audible and noticeable to the player. The theme needs to shine through, while still ensuring that from a gameplay perspective, everything makes sense all together.

To make our lives easier, both of the teams make heavy use of scripts that help our workflow. It saves us hours of time per skin. There are various scripts that create templates, import all the files, and export everything correctly, ensuring there's no human error and that the sound designers get to spend their time doing what they like most - making the skin sound cool!

When asked what his favourite skins to work on were, Demute's lead sound designer on SMITE, Karlo, didn't pick the usual suspects from famous IPs, but instead mentioned ridiculous characters like a guy in a dinosaur costume or a floating can of beans skins for Baba Yaga, which obviously had fart sounds and fart rockets, because of course that was an opportunity they couldn't resist.

Being a musician at heart, Karlo finds particular joy in working on characters infused with musical elements. The creative interplay between sounds and characters resonates deeply with him. Yet, if given the chance to dream, Karlo's ambitions soar high, and he shares that he'd love to unleash his creativity on world-renowned IPs like Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Maybe some day, if the SMITE gods allow it!

With new character skins arriving every month to keep the players engaged, our team at Demute rises to the challenge to keep them sounding both interesting and satisfying. There is a lot of uncharted territory left, and we're eager to see where our combined journey brings us.