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!

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!

May 2018 Sound Design Showreel

Made my first sound design reel! Picked a few sections from the various projects I worked on during the past year of my studies that show my implementation and sound design skills. It's rough and needs a lot of work, but hey for my first reel I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out.