Bay Bryan's 'The Meadow' album launched this week!
I recorded bird and nature ambiences for a couple of the tracks back in 2021. It’s really great to be able to hear the full album now that it has finally been released into the wild! 🎶
Bay Bryan - The Meadow Album
I'm contributing field recordings to Bay Bryan's upcoming concept album 'The Meadow'!
This has been a really lovely & special project to be involved with.
Capturing outdoor ambiences of wind, water, leaves and birds (plus generating a few cheeky granular synth textures here and there) to go with Bay's music and lyrics was a fun creative process. I'm really looking forward to hearing the final mixes once they're ready.
Bay's first single 'Sticky Shadows' drops on 16th July - you can pre-save the track here: https://kycker.ffm.to/stickyshadows
For more info on the album, here’s a blog post from Bay: http://baybryan.co.uk/blog/2021/6/29/an-invitation-into-the-meadow⠀
GJL Game Parade Spring Jam '21 - ‘After The Storm’
It was incredibly good fun to work with Kim Lomas (Level Designer) Sean Hall (Programmer) Juliana Milusheva and Ythen Sawers (3D Artists) on 'After the Storm', a short game we made for the GJL Game Parade Spring Jam!
The theme for this jam was 'Strength Lies In Differences', and the story for our game is as follows:
“As the thunder rolls in, a catastrophic tsunami hits the once vibrant and lively beach town you reside in, separating you from your family. After finding a small boat in the place you took shelter in, you set out to find and reunite with them, but it’s the kindness of strangers that will help you on your way. As you come across survivors, you must find a way to communicate with each despite speaking different languages. Help them on your journey and they may help you in return.”
The game is available to play directly in your browser from the itch.io page:
https://seanwhall.itch.io/after-the-storm
Music is from Phil Michalski + Brandon Boone’s ‘Digital Illusions’ pack.
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! :)
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.
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!