The team decided to take a different approach to foley this game.
Typically in visual media (TV, film, games), footstep, cloth, and interaction foley is performed live to picture, and then cleaned up and edited in post, if need be.
In my experience, the largest amount of time spent in foley is on footsteps. Timing, performance, and volume all need to be practiced multiple times to picture, memorizing the scene and its nuances, until you’ve hopefully captured your best take.
In games and animation (where production sound is absent and all audio needs to be created from scratch), a 7 minute scene with 6 characters, all needing footsteps (with varying shoe types) performed to picture can quickly grow to be time consuming with diminishing returns.
Also take into account the nature of animation and game design. In film or TV, the visual aspects of a character are locked. For example, after picture lock, you can count on a certain character in a specific scene having the same shoe type, for it to not be raining, and for the character’s costume to remain the same.
In games, where dozens of people are simultaneously refining environments, effects, character models, etc., this is not the case, and any one item in the foley track in a scene may need to be swapped quickly to match something visual that has changed.
Hopefully you can see how important time, energy, and flexibility were when creating audio for MKX’s story mode.
