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!

Milksop Games - EGX & Tranzfuser 2019

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.

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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!

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

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(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: pet shop where you run a shop and try to take care of your pets. It's pretty cute by @MilksopGames here at #egx2019 pic.twitter.com/jhBzXo4QoK

— Jupiter @ #funandserious (@Jupiter_Hadley) October 19, 2019

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.

Futureworks Graduation - 14/10/19

This week I attended the Futureworks graduation ceremony - the second part of my graduation process if you will! The UCLan graduation back in June was fantastic, exactly the sort of big, loud and fancy hat and gown affair you’d want from an academic institution at the culmination of your studies. However, it did feel a little strange celebrating on an alien campus that I’d never visited before, and a bit incomplete without the company of the diligent tutors who have helped guide me and my peers through our higher education journey.

Thankfully, those feelings of incompleteness were soon alleviated when this second graduation ceremony rolled around! The Futureworks graduation ceremony at the Royal Northern College of Music was more of a personal and homely event where me and my fellow graduates could catch up with our tutors and celebrate everyone’s hard work over the past three years.

Just typing that out last sentence feels really weird, can’t believe things have flown by that quickly! Time really does fly when you’re having fun and studying alongside awesome folks working on the coolest projects!

It was really fantastic to see all the various films, albums, animations and games my fellow students have produced during our time at Futureworks, and it felt great to celebrate their effort, grit and determination and see their hard work displayed up on the big cinema screen of the RNCM!

I was also incredibly honoured to be presented with an award for Best Student on the BSc Game & Interactive Audio course!

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My certificates and award for Best Student on the Game & Interactive Audio course! I was absolutely over the moon when I got called up to the stage to receive it!

Congratulations and all the best to the Futureworks class of ‘19!

School of Video Game Audio - Student Success Newsletter Feature

I got featured in the School of Video Game Audio’s October newsletter as a student success story!

Leonard Paul reached out to me after he checked out a series of blog posts I wrote during my time studying on the SOVGA Wwise course to document my progress and learning, and asked if I could contribute a few words about my experience on the course to an upcoming community newsletter. Of course, I was only too happy to help out!

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Just sent out our community update for October for the first time using MailChimp, hopefully you've gotten yours? Email https://t.co/QdCqqifEQO for a copy or ask us any questions you'd like 😀! pic.twitter.com/XMYpyGMJVe

— School of Video Game Audio🕹️🎶 (@SchoolGameAudio) October 10, 2019

Victor's Vector - UE4 Summer Jam 2019

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!