Footfall: Footstep Matrix, 12 Surfaces x 4 Gaits x 3 Weights

One foot, 12 grounds

576 footsteps indexed the way a footstep system asks for them: surface x gait x weight, with 4 takes in every cell, plus 12 seamless walking loops. 588 files in total.

Every step in this pack is made by the same foot: one heel, roll and toe for each gait, one sole, one body mass. Only the ground changes. So a character walking from grass onto stone sounds like one character changing ground, not like the game switching sound libraries mid stride.

There is a free demo below: 33 of the 588 sounds, including a walk on all 12 surfaces, the full light to heavy ramp and two of the walking loops. Put it in your game before you decide.

The licence, in plain words

• Royalty free in commercial games. Ship as many titles as you like.
• No attribution required. A credit line is welcome, never demanded.
• No per title limit, no revenue cap, no registration.
• You may not resell or redistribute the pack itself as a sound pack.

Credit line, if you want one:

Footstep sounds: "Footfall" by Core Systems Asset Factory

The three axes

• 12 surfaces, all dry: carpet, wood floor, dirt path, snow, metal grate, stone, sand, tile, grass, gravel, ice, dry leaves.
• 4 gaits: walk, run, sneak and land (both feet after a jump, then the weight settling).
• 3 weights: light, medium and heavy. Heavier bodies land darker on every surface.

The file name is built straight from your game state:

step_<surface>_<gait>_<weight>_<take>.ogg      e.g. step_gravel_run_heavy_03.ogg

Pick a take at random and a footstep never machine guns. The takes differ in stride timing and in how the ground settles, so they differ in length as well as texture.

Every cell is its own sound, measured

Inside each weight, every pair of cells that differ in one thing (two surfaces at the same gait, or two gaits on the same surface) was measured apart on brightness or length: 1008 pairs, none failed. Weight is checked as an ordered ramp: on all 48 surface and gait combinations the step darkens from light to medium to heavy, and the lightest is at least 1.51x brighter than the heaviest.

Pairs with Wade

The gait names are the same four our wet surface pack uses, so one footstep switch drives both.

Wade covers every WET surface (damp ground, puddles, shallow water, knee deep and wading); Footfall covers the dry ones.

Unseen: Stealth Sound Effects is the stealth game around these feet: a detection ladder, distractions, lockpicks and alarms. Every role the two packs share was measured from both packs' files and is a different sound.

The formats

• .wav source grade and .ogg engine ready, 44.1 kHz, 16-bit mono, dry (no reverb), every file in both.
• 12 walking loops (4 s, eight steps, 120 steps a minute) with sample-accurate loop points in the file.
• A naming manifest listing every file, and import notes for Unity, Godot, Unreal, GameMaker, FMOD, Wwise and the web.

Measured, and said plainly

A pack_proof.json ships in the download with a sha256 and a full measurement record for every one of the 588 files. 5314 signal checks passed over the shipped audio: no clipping, no silent renders, no abrupt starts or ends, loop seams measured two ways, and the inner 80% of the pack inside 4.89 dB.

What was not measured is whether they sound good. Everything here is computed procedurally from a hand-written foot model and hand-written surface models (resonant bodies for the hard floors, grain models for gravel, snow, sand, dirt and leaves). No sample library, no recordings, no generative audio model, which is why the licence above can be that simple. The free demo is there for the part a measurement cannot judge.

Goes with

• Harness, the body layer that sits on top of these footsteps: cloth, a heavy cloak, leather, mail, plate and an adventurer's pack at the same four gaits (walk, run, sneak, land), with walk loops on the same step grid as this pack's walk loops.

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Core Systems Asset Factory