Under Cover - Announce Trailer

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“ACTION!”

So…the big day has finally arrived!

I'm very excited to say that I've been working as the sound designer for Under Cover - a VR lightgun shooter game by Sigtrap Games for Meta Quest! 🤩

Under Cover | Announce Trailer

Under Cover has been a thrilling project to contribute to from start to finish, and it has been an absolute pleasure to get to play a small part in such a lovely and supportive team that have been bringing it together.

I can't begin to say how excited I am for folks to get to their hands on it and play in Feb '24!

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!)

Game Audio Symposium '23

Leeds Met University hosted its first Game Audio Symposium event this past weekend, and it was a really lovely time!

Obligatory event lanyard & badge picture! Each attendee had to list a game that they particularly enjoyed audio-wise on their badge, which was a fun touch. My choice went to the latest RE2 remake - I think the foley team at Capcom are ridiculously good at what they do; the movement and weapon handling sounds for Claire/Leon are absolutley top-notch!

The event was hosted by Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould (authors of the exellent Game Audio Implementation book and various Unreal Online Learning courses), and the whole roster of speakers throughout the day were very engaging to listen to. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!

In other news, a new project I recently worked on has recently been released, which is always an exciting time! Hoping to be able to share more info…soon! 🤞

Reel Talk - Showreel Review (28/10/21)

I had my sound design showreel reviewed by Power Up Audio’s Kevin Regamey on the Reel Talk livestream this week!

I’ve been watching Reel Talk for several years at this point, but I’ve always felt nervous about putting myself forward for review as the standard of work is incredibly high, and (like a lot of people) I suffer from imposter syndrome pretty badly. However, after putting it off for so long, I realised that this was an opportunity that I simply couldn’t afford to let pass me by, so I sent in an application back in August.

Well, I’m so glad I did, as this was an incredibly eye-opening and useful experience - one that I wish I had signed up for a lot earlier in my sound design journey! I received lots of really useful feedback on my sound design pieces, my video editing choices and my overall website layout, all of which I will be using to inform and improve my work going forward.

Huge thanks to Kevin for taking the time to review and critique my reel piece-by-piece, I’m massively grateful to have had this opportunity.

Also, a big thank you goes out to the lovely Reel Talk audience, who kindly offered plenty of really great suggestions about material selection/web design as well, which I intend to implement ASAP.

So, I’m feeling really inspired and ready to get to work on the next reel - time to go find some cool clips to re-design!

Unreal Online Learning - UE4 Audio Courses

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.

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