Unreal

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October '23

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Happy Halloween folks! 🎃 Here’s a brief rundown of what’s been going on with me sound design-(W)wise with me in October.

Lost Skies - Davey Wards Silver Winner

REALTIME recently announced that the Lost Skies animated trailer has won a Silver Award at the 2023 Davey Awards!

Once again, massive congrats to Justin Andree at Blitz Audio, and all the folks at REALTIME, Bossa Games, Rumpus Animation & Humble Bundle for another awesome achievement! I’m chuffed to have been able to play a small part in this lovely project - the sound design for this trailer was a real joy to work on!

Wwise Training - 3D Audio Mixing

At the tail end of September, I attended one of Audiokinetic’s online training sessions to learn more about the workflow for 3D Audio Mixing in Wwise. While spatial audio is an extremely exciting area of much innovation in the field of game audio, in my opinion, it also comes with a significantly steep learning curve. I’ve found that it can be challenging just to get one’s head around some of the tricky concepts involved (all of which build upon each other in complicated ways), let alone feel prepared enough to be able to confidently author and implement assets for a spatial audio project. For this reason, when I saw this training session, I knew that I had to make sure I attended no matter what!

This was an incredibly useful and engaging session that covered a lot of ground in a short space of time. While there was only so much that could reasonably be covered in the 4-hour runtime, I do now feel much more confident with the spatial audio workflow in Wwise, and I’m looking forward to putting these strategies into practice in my future projects.

Wwise 101 Revision

I’ve been going through the Wwise 101 materials again to brush up on the core fundamentals ahead of taking the 301 and 251 certifications. The last time I went step-by-step through all of the 101 documentation was back in 2018, so it felt like it was due time for me to have a bit of a refresh.

I did have a couple of stumbles in the last few modules (no thanks to some slightly odd wording in pair of questions asking about the exact definitions of aux buses and effects rendering), but other than that, I think it went fairly well.

The next step in my plan to become more (W)wisened is to tackle the 301 cert, so it’s time to lace up my adventuring books, pick up my sword and prepare for the journey into the Wwise Adventure Game’s Allegro Kingdom. Wish me luck!

Post apocalyptic Desert

One of the audio implementation projects I’m currently chipping away at is a sound re-design for the ‘Post Apocalyptic Desert’ UE4 environment asset by KK Design. I’ve been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and really enjoying how the sounds have been designed and implemented for the various vehicles of Night City - parituclarly the older, clunkier trucks and jeeps that tend to appear in the nomadic Badlands on the megacity’s outskirts.

Post Apocalyptic Desert is a complete project, that most importantly for my purposes, contains a cool rugged vehicle.

One small but very satisfying bit of progress so far has been learning how to swap out the the defaut UE4 mannequin with one a bit more character - namely the ‘Cyberpunk Mercenary’ model by Fajrul Falakh NF - Characters.

I’m still in the early stages of this design, but I’m pleased with what I’ve been able to get done so far - namely, getting a lot of print string nodes in place ready for sounds to be dropped in later. Having just watched Michał Pukała’s super-inspiring Taking It Up A Notch Game Sound Con talk, which focused how the audio team at CD Projekt Red approached upgrading and overhauling their vehicle audio content and pipeline, I’m keen to see if I can try and replicate some of their techniques they used to bring Night City’s cars to life, albiet on a much, MUCH, smaller scale (i.e. 1 car versus 100s of cars!)

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Unreal Online Learning - UE4 Audio Courses

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Had a couple of (exciting) work and life changes ongoing these past two months, so I haven’t had as much time to work on personal projects recently.

However, I have been having a lot of fun steadily working through some of the excellent audio resources made by Dave Raybould and Richard Stevens on the Unreal Online Learning site.

So far I’ve been through their courses on Ambient and Proceedural Sound Design, and Dynamic Audio. I’m currently working through the next two courses in the series, Sound and Space and Understanding Audio Mixing and Effects.

Here’s a short video I after completing the Ambient and Procedural Sound Design course. I created the sounds for this campfire using a combination of DSP Fantasy renders and some recordings I made of water droplets in a hot frying pan.

I’m also chuffed that I was able to script the fish asset to do a really basic rotation too!

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Milksop Games - EGX & Tranzfuser 2019

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After months of hard work, I got to attend EGX 2019 with Milksop Games at the London ExCeL Centre, and see Heads ‘n’ Tails on display at the big Tranzfuser stand!

I’ve visited EGX numerous times in the past as a regular attendee, but it was an altogether more special and unique occasion to actually take part in the event alongside an exhibiting team.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to see members of the public playing Heads ‘n’ Tails. Watching people enjoying themselves and having a fun time playing a game that I designed audio content for were deeply gratifying, affirming and fulfilling moments I’ll always proudly remember.

Milksop Games on the Tranzfuser stand! It was so cool to see people come up and want to have a play on Heads ‘n’ Tails. The team noticed that players who played the game with the headphones on tended to get higher scores than those who didn’t, which was great to hear! Looks like all that time recording different goblin voice emotes paid off!

Lee helping a player to set their new high score on the leaderboard. Nicely done!

(Most of) the Milksop Games crew! From the left to right: Me (Audio Designer), Eli De Carteret (Level Designer), Cat Wiltshire (Prop Artist), Lee Stockton (Environment Artist), Alan Horton (Technical Designer) and Jasmine Streatfield (3D Character Modeller & Rigger). Big virtual shout-outs too to Laura Flinders (Environment Artist) our Italian teammates, Samuele Bandini (Concept Artist) and Diana Ulloa (Animator).

Heads ‘n’ Tails has been such a fun and enriching project to work on. I’m extremely grateful to the Milksop Games team for giving me the opportunity to come on board the project as Audio Designer. Working alongside such a talented team to help bring their vision for the game to life, and get to work so closely with all the different design disciplines was an exciting, challenging and inspiring journey from start to finish.

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop is now live on the Milksop Games itch.io page, so you can check it out for yourself (and hear the various daft goblin sounds I designed first-hand!)

Post-EGX Updates & Game Coverage

Youtubers TheGrumpyBrit and BlindsideUK checked out Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop as part of their Tranzfuser coverage of EGX 2019. It was great to hear they enjoyed playing the game (and thought our pet designs were adorable!), but apologies for the stress!

We were lucky enough to get Jupiter Hadley to check the game out, and got some great (and fair) feedback in her write-up on Indie Games Plus:

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop also got featured on Tranzfuser’s EGX video livestream. where Eli, Laura and Cat chat to the presenter and walk him through the gameplay on the Ice level.

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Victor's Vector - UE4 Summer Jam 2019

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From August 8th-13th, I took part in the 2019 UE4 Summer Jam with the Harlan Designs team (Programmer Alan Horton, Level + Game Designer Eli De Carteret + 3D Artist Lee Stockton). Together, we made Victor’s Vector, a short 3D puzzle-platformer game!

The theme for this game jam was ‘Make it count’, which inspired the game’s central mechanic - every time the player moves, the floor block they were previously standing on falls away! If the player falls off an edge, then it’s game over, so they have to make every individual movement really count!

However, if the player has collected a power-up before they fall, the game will do a stylised VHS rewind sequence back to the previous checkpoint so they can try again. Check out the video below to see how a full playthrough of the game plays out:

I designed sound effects and music for the game, and implemented them into the build using Perforce…which was quite frankly awesome! This was my first time properly using source control, and I can tell that I’m already going to really miss it whenever I have to work without the software in the future. It really helped to speed things up with my implementation workflow and enabled me to remotely work much more efficiently as a sound designer.

It was really great working with Alan, Eli and Lee on such a fun project! Obviously, with the small time scale inherent to a game jam, there were naturally areas where I wish I could have spent more time. For example, I ran out of time to make sounds for some of the block movements, such as when a block rises or falls into place after activating a switch. Having sounds in place for these events would perhaps have helped point out key information aurally to the player in a more elegant multi-modal manner. At the moment, the player has to rely only a visual information for these events, so having specific sound cues for block movements would have been a nice additional features to have in the game.

Overall though, I’m really pleased with how everything came together! I’m particularly pleased with my design and implementation of Victor’s movement sounds, as these were all sourced from various personal recordings I’d made of hand drill motor revs for the servos and light metal cup impacts for the footsteps.

Footstep and servo sounds for the cute player robot character Victor! These are triggered from moving play sound notifies in the walking animation composite.

I’m also pleased with the basic passive mixing system I had time to quickly implement for the game’s music. Using UE4’s soundclasses and a sound mix modifier, I set things up so that whenever the VHS UI widget is displayed, the music volume is slightly ducked, and vice versa when the UI widget is no longer displayed onscreen, the music returns to it’s original volume. Although this is nothing particualrly complex or groundbreaking, I’m nonetheless pleased with this mixing feature as I believe it helped give prominence and bring focus to the rewind stage of gameplay.

That’s all for now, it’s time for me to make things count myself and get back on with the work for Milksop Games and Tranzfuser!

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Milksop Games - Tranzfuser 2019

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I’m working with the lovely folks at Milksop Games (@MilksopGames) as Audio Designer on their Tranzfuser project Heads ‘n’ Tails!

https://futureworks.ac.uk/news/2019/08/futureworks-students-chosen-for-tranzfuser/

I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to do sound design for their game, which is an isometric fantasy pet shop management experience for PC and Android. The main gameplay loop involves caring for three different types of magical animals across multiple elemental themed levels, while also attending to customer’s needs and requests. To get a high score, the player has to carefully manage their costs (by selecting the right items for pets and customers quickly and efficiently) and maintain a high reputation (by attending to the pets’ needs quickly and efficiently). These values act as score multipliers at the end of each level, so players who can keep a cool head when everything’s getting frantic with pet and customer requests will be able to rocket up the leaderboards!

I joined the team in the last week of June, and the first major sprint week of the project. The Tranzfuser period lasts for 10 sprints, running from June 24th to September 1st. At the time of writing we’re currently on Sprint 5, about a third of the way through the project. At this point, the team are busy compiling a white-box test as a proof of concept piece.

On the audio side of things, so far I’ve designed ambient audio cues for each level, a musical theme for the main menu, a collection of UI sounds for gameplay menu navigation, and the dialogue emotes for the goblin customer NPCs.

With the development time left on the project, I need to record the remaining dialogue and sound effects for the pets creatures, complete sounds for the various player-controlled incidental sounds and finish the music for the gameplay levels and the score screen leaderboards.

As you can see, there’s a lot of things to do and not a lot of time to do them all in! As time is of the essence, I thought I’d make this a quick post to record what’s going on and where I’m currently up to in the Tranzfuser process.

Time to get back to making sounds…as fast as humanly possible!