Daemon Prince

Without a doubt, one of my proudest accomplishments in the development of Total War: Warhammer III was the systems that drove the Daemon Prince. The Daemon prince was the first ever fully customisable character present in a Total War: Warhammer game. None of our systems or structures were designed to support this so it was a very fun technical challenge to figure out where audio could play from to give this unit a modular setup. In a traditional unit, most of our audio assignments (such as armour types) are assigned on the units Variant Mesh Definition. From here we can assign audio types that are defined by switch groups in Wwise. The Daemon Prince was in no way a traditional unit. Each limb had its own Variant Definition file so we needed a system that meant when conflicting assignments were put on one Daemon Prince character the most appropriate sounds would be played. For instance, If Daemon Prince was wearing chainmail legs but the torso was wearing leather straps we needed a system that didn’t just double up voices and play both nor did we want a system that would just pick the last read assignment. To combat this I made the “priority system”. Essentially this was a system where each armour type was given a priority number from 1 to 50. The assignment with the highest number would be the switch chosen. So to use the previous example the heavy plate legs have a priority of 40 but the leather straps on the torso have a priority of 20, this means our Foley switch will use the louder and more important heavy plate sounds to convey the Daemon Prince's Foley as he runs through the battlefield. An important aspect of the Daemon Prince was the sound design content itself. Various combinations of assets could be mixed together should the player wish, so I had to ensure all assets could blend together nicely and not have clashing frequency content.

As of CHAMPIONS OF CHAOS

The Daemon Prince has the current asset sets that are all defined by switch groups in Wwise, which match up with VMD assignments and then from there are triggered by events attached to metadata tags that are placed on the animation files of the Daemon Prince. These sets are:

Voice set

• Daemon Head Vox

• Bird Head Vox

Footstep Sets

• Bloated (Puss and slime)

• Ember (Burning/ on fire)

• Flesh (Default)

• Hoove (more attack than default feet)

• Metal

Body sets

• Flesh

• Leather

• Chainmail

• Heavy Metal

• Plate

Body Glow

• Generic (to cover glowing VFX)

• Khorne (more fire-based, God of war in Warhammer)

• No Glow (the default, used when no Daemon Prince parts glow)

• Slaanesh (God of pleasure in Warhammer)

• Tzeentch (God of magic in Warhammer)

Wing Sets

• Ember

• Feather

• Leather

• Metal Feather

• Metal Leather

• No Wing (default and one used if the player builds a daemon prince with no wings)

Video showcasing different Daemon Prince parts and how they sound