Warhammer 3's UI Sounds Tell You Everything Before You Even Look at the Screen

Source: GDC | Published: 2026-09-17T19:50:02Z

Great UI audio lets players read game state without relying on visuals — the Metal Gear alert was the gold standard Johnny chased while designing sound identities for Warhammer 3's three factions.

One Supervisor's Comment That Opened Everything Up

This was during Johnny's time at Creative Assembly working on Warhammer 3. His supervisor Valentin sat down with him for a conversation that completely upended his understanding of UI sound design.

Valentin described UI as "an incredibly free, incredibly abstract sound design challenge." For Johnny, it was a genuine paradigm shift. He had expected to be locked in a tiny box — but those words blew the doors open: as long as it fits the theme you're designing for, you can do almost anything.

The alert sound from Metal Gear Solid is the example he keeps coming back to. Players don't need to see the red exclamation mark above a guard's head — that single alert communicates everything: we've been spotted, now it's fight, hide in a box, or get caught. The real power of UI sound is making players fully understand the current state without relying on visual cues at all.

UI Sound Can Tell Stories, Not Just Communicate State

Johnny laid out several sorely underused applications for UI sound.

Level-up effects can grow more powerful as the player gets stronger — progress itself can be expressed through sound. Location popups can hint at what kind of environment you're about to enter. UI can deliberately unsettle: if something chaotic is happening in the game world, the UI can mirror that with glitch sounds. And perhaps most overlooked of all, good UI sound design is critical for players with accessibility needs — for someone relying entirely on audio to understand what's happening, the clarity of UI sounds directly determines whether they can play at all.

Add these dimensions together and UI sound stops being interface decoration. It becomes part of the narrative.

Using UX Design Principles to Validate Sound Choices

Johnny stumbled into a UX design course during his master's program — it was supposed to be about game audio, but half of it covered app and website design. He thought it was a waste of time. Then, while working on Warhammer, he discovered that UX thinking mapped surprisingly well onto UI sound design.

He distilled five principles from the field:

Isolation Effect: Important information needs to be sonically distinctive. He uses a lock-picking example — within a cluster of mechanical clicks, the sound for "correct position" must stand out from the rest. Similar texture, different feel.

Cognitive Load: People lose track when there's too much coming at once. The solution is organizing sounds into small, recognizable clusters — small, medium, and large potions sharing similar tonal characteristics so players know by ear alone which one they just used.

Selective Attention: People automatically filter out irrelevant information, so you need to use mixing or the source material itself to ensure the important UI sounds cut through.

Occam's Razor: Choose the simplest effective solution. Johnny admits he's fallen into the over-engineering trap multiple times — stepped back, went with the most direct approach, and got the best result.

Flow: The hardest UX principle to nail, in his view. Keeping players immersed requires sound to clearly confirm the result of every action, while eliminating any design friction that could break concentration.

He compresses these five principles into five questions he asks himself: Is the important sound distinctive enough? Is it easy to identify? Will it grab attention when it needs to? Have I overcomplicated it? Is anything creating unnecessary friction?

Write a Brief Design Brief Before You Start

When a task comes in, Johnny's habit is to put together a short brief before diving in — a mind map, a few notes. He structures it around three questions.

First: how complex and large does this sound need to be? He assigns a hierarchy to UI sounds. For a menu screen: navigation sounds are smallest and lightest, selection is slightly larger with more layering, confirmation is the most important action so it gets the most weight. Establishing the hierarchy upfront means you don't burn time on secondary sounds, and you don't accidentally make an unimportant element as prominent as your most critical interaction.

Second: how much does this sound affect gameplay mechanics? A settings menu is low impact, a level-up screen is medium, and UI directly tied to combat mechanics — a parry timing cue, for instance — is high impact. The higher the impact, the more headroom you need to carve out in the mix so the player immediately understands what happened.

Third: is this a positive, negative, or neutral effect? Once you answer that, the design direction largely falls into place. Positive tends toward rising pitch, bright textures, major tonality. Negative goes downward, more low-end, minor tonality. Neutral avoids strong directional movement either way.

Five Dimensions for Finding Source Material With Character

If you want UI sound with genuine personality rather than "another set of dings," Johnny offers five directions for finding inspiration.

In-game technology aesthetic. What era and technology does the game inhabit? Tactile mechanical systems or magic-driven? The analog-flavored retro sci-fi of Alien: Romulus or the clean, digital future of Star Trek? Let the technology aesthetic determine the fundamental vocabulary of your sounds.

Materials. Are there consistent material themes running through the game? Crystals in Final Fantasy, the metals, stone, and bone of different Warhammer factions. What does the UI itself look like it's made of — rock, parchment, pure digital space? Material determines what source recordings you go hunting for.

Environmental ecology. His personal favorite dimension. Location popup UI that triggers when you enter a new area is where this shines. A snow environment can incorporate the sound of ice and arctic wind; a jungle environment can pull in bird species that actually exist in that region, or even creatures the player encounters in that zone.

Tonality and texture. Tonally: whispers, chanting, Gregorian chant, musical fragments, unusual instruments (hydrophone, bowed instruments), metallic resonance or synthesis that creates unease. For texture, he has a particular fondness for recording fabric, pitching it down and stretching it, adding a touch of saturation — using it as a low-frequency "sweetener" that adds a thick, underlying sense of movement.

Cinematic processing. He currently uses three plugins in combination: Inflator for overall volume and body, Uberloud for multi-band saturation control, and Kilohearts Distortion for dynamic drive — in Reaper, he maps distortion amount to input signal strength so distortion peaks at the transient, adding punch while preserving dynamics. Another technique: high-frequency enhancement by duplicating a track, high-passing it, pitching it up an octave, adding distortion, and blending it back into the original — the result is more sparkling high-frequency harmonics.

Three Warhammer 3 Factions, Three Completely Different Design Logics

Johnny used his UI sound work for three factions in the Warhammer 3 DLC as case studies.

Nurgle (the Plague God) is a chaos faction, and the entire sonic system is built around filth, rot, and viscera. The faction's UI is used to recruit six special heroes, and Johnny's goal was to make it sound as revolting as possible. He incorporated metal impacts and breaking glass to reinforce the feeling of brutal close-quarters combat, keeping the overall tone decayed and malevolent. He sees it as a good example of the cognitive load principle — players familiar with Warhammer 3 can identify the faction by sound alone. The audio itself forms a recognizable language.

Grand Cathay's sound system grew from unpacking the faction's worldview: Chinese instruments, metal (from their metal magic), stone (from their enormous terracotta guardian warriors), and the sonic signatures of dragons and lions. The interface Johnny designed for them was a magical compass, and the goal was to make it feel like "ancient machinery fused with magic" — mechanical movement underneath a sweeping magical presence, with a sense of real weight when you commit to a direction and alter the course of the campaign. Looking back, he'd have leaned harder into Chinese instruments, and with dragons all over the interface, he'd definitely find a way to work dragon sounds in there.

Kislev's Witch Hut is his personal favorite. The interface belongs to an old crone who wields dark magic — not the faction's winter theme, but a very specific character. His goal was to make the player feel like they were "brewing evil potions in a hut deep in a dark forest." He built a dedicated ambient layer for the interface: an eerie tonal wind alongside a bubbling cauldron. Ingredient drops used bone sounds throughout to unify the texture and maintain the unsettling witchcraft atmosphere.

The hardest part was differentiating two effects: a blessing (positive) and a curse (negative). Johnny wanted the blessing to feel positive while remaining grounded in dark magic — pleasant, but with an undercurrent of danger. The curse incorporated a death whistle and screaming, creating a sharp contrast.

"Try the Weird Thing": His Favorite Risk

While working on Warhammer 3, he was digging through game audio files when he came across a specific unit — the Terrorgheist — emitting a demented laugh. He was designing a particular UI screen at the time, thought of that laugh, and threw it in just to see.

It worked. Valentin loved it. That version shipped.

This became a principle for himself and for other sound designers he'd talk to: if you think of something that doesn't seem quite "right," try it anyway. If it doesn't work, delete it. The Witch Hut had a similar moment — he'd built an overly elaborate ambient layer with creaking wood and outdoor nature sounds, listened back, decided it was too distracting, stripped it all out, and went back to simplicity.

Together, these two experiences point to the same truth: direction comes from trying things, not from planning them.

Loud Doesn't Mean Important

Johnny closed with a point about dynamic control that's easy to miss.

If every UI sound is equally large and equally impactful, then none of them actually feel important. Low-frequency content and strong transients should be reserved for genuinely critical sounds. Secondary navigation effects should stay restrained. That dynamic contrast is itself communicating information — players unconsciously register that some actions carry more weight than others.

The other principle: reusing existing sound assets isn't laziness, it's strategy. Warhammer 3 had an enormous library of production-ready audio, and Johnny drew from it heavily. That freed him to concentrate his time on the interfaces that genuinely required custom treatment. Reuse is what makes the truly distinctive designs stand out.