A complete linear sound redesign of the Frost Ancient boss encounter from God of War Ragnarök. To challenge my technical skills and creative boundaries, I set my self a challenge of only using organic recordings. Every sound asset was built completely from scratch using my Røde NTG5 shotgun microphone to capture raw, everyday household objects. The goal was to try match the immense depth and weight of modern AAA gameplay using purely organic, hand-recorded source material.

To capture the varying sounds of the encounter, I broke the sound design down into three core pillars: For the anatomy of the Frost Ancient, the goal was to achieve a clumped, ancient frozen ice feel rather than just simple crystal snaps. I experimented with shattering, and dense rock movements to build the creature's physical presence. Its movement was created from layering the crunching of frozen bags and plastic bottles. To add a layer of realism, I combined these shattering elements with glass textures and the heavy, grinding friction of various types of real rocks.

To recreated Kratos’ Leviathan Axe, the attacking movement layers consisted of using a blend of knife sharpens, bamboo swipes and various metallic rings to give the blade its sharp, harsh sound. For the recall, I collided different layers of heavy wood to recreated that organic wooden thud alongside fire recordings.

The elemental laser beams and spell attacks were created using advanced processing and resampling to achieve the high-end magic and a wet, low-mid rumble. An electric stove lighter is the base for the entire beam sequence, layered with heavily modulated and processed vocal textures during. For all the impact sounds, I used the explosive ignition of a fire using methanol. To create the high-frequency elements, I applied linear phasing to shattered glass recordings for a sharp, frozen texture. The same linear phasing process was then used on recordings of clothes to generate the sub-heavy magical rumble for the main beam. This was achieved through pitching, again, lots of processing, resampling, and stitching different individual parts together to fit with the clip.