Under Cover - Launch Week

Under Cover launched today on the Meta Quest store!! 🥳

The launch week for the game has been incredible! I went to VR Manchester on Tuesday 13th Feb to see Luke Thompson's (Creative Director + Technical Lead) fireside chat on the development of the game. It was such a surreal moment to see the project we’d been working on for the past 2-years up on the big screens in front of everyone!

Luke Thompson giving a talk on Under Cover at VR Manchester.

Then later in the week, it was so great to be able to hang out & catch up with the lovely SIGTRAP/Under Cover team in person once again at the launch party! 🙌🏻😊

The lovely Under Cover crew! Love these folks ❤️ (plus the people who couldn’t make it to the meetup, you were missed 🥲) Here’s to hoping our paths cross again on future projects.

Under Cover pin badges! These were a sweet gift from Gary (Creative Director & Art Director) and given to all the dev team. Cheers Gary!

It was a huge honour and prrivilige to get to play a small part in this project, and to get to work with such a hard-working, friendly and passionate dev team. If you’ve got a Meta Quest 2/3/Pro and you’re up for some VR lightgun fun, then it’s time to take ‘ACTION!’ and jump in - there’s no time (crisis) to waste!

October '23

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!

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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!

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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.

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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!)

School of Video Game Audio - Unity Course Projects

Here’s a few video clips from some of the projects I’ve been working on throughout July and August while studying on the School of Video Game Audio’s Unity course.

Grenadier Footstep Sound Re-Design

Grenadier Grenade Sounds Re-Design

Viking Village Water Submersion Toggle

2020 Update

Howdy doody folks!

Hope you’re all safe and well out there - at the time of writing, everything’s still in lockdown here in the UK with the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst things are on a bit of a lull at the moment and the flow of time itself feels convoluted, I thought now would perhaps be a good time to write a quick post on what I’ve been up to lately.

It’s been a while since my last blog post, and despite the scary state of the world at the moment, 2020 has been a pretty busy year for me so far, despite all the chaos. I can’t go into any specifics, but I will say that I’ve worked at Immotion Studios on a couple of super fun projects throughout February and March, and I’ve been working as a freelance sound designer for We Make Audio since early Feb!

I’ve also got a couple of half-finished projects I’ve had on the backburner for absolutely ages now, so I thought now would finally be a good time to actually get these finished up and put out in the world. These include my Steampunk Robot sound pack, as well as some music tracks from a couple of different projects that I never got around to releasing. Watch this space for a little bit longer, and I’ll have them out as soon as possible…I hope!

I’ve also been getting a lot of emails from audio students asking for help with Wwise implementation issues in the Unity 3D Game Kit, so I’m considering possibly making some kind of short tutorial or walkthrough to act as a standalone guide that hopefully helps people out? If you’re reading this and that’s something that would appeal to you, then definitely get in touch and let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like me to cover - I’ll see what I can rustle up when I get chance.

Stay safe and make some cool sounds! :)

Wwise Up On Air - Community Spotlight Feature

I got a really cool shout-out from the awesome Damian Kastbauer on the Audiokinetic Twitch channel!

Damian checked out some of blog posts I made during my final year of university when I was working on an audio re-design for the Unity 3D Adventure Game as my final year honours project.

For this project, I muted all the original sounds and music running natively from the Unity audio engine, and designed and implemented new audio into the game using Wwise. As a method of logging my progress while working on the project, I wrote weekly blog posts about the challenges I would face trying to implement various audio features into the game, and how I eventually found solutions to said challenges…which usually involved a lot of tinkering in C# and breaking scripts!

Audiokinetic went live on Twitch. Catch up on their VOD now.

Thanks for reading my blog Damian!