2019

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Milksop Games - Tranzfuser 2019

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I’m working with the lovely folks at Milksop Games (@MilksopGames) as Audio Designer on their Tranzfuser project Heads ‘n’ Tails!

https://futureworks.ac.uk/news/2019/08/futureworks-students-chosen-for-tranzfuser/

I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to do sound design for their game, which is an isometric fantasy pet shop management experience for PC and Android. The main gameplay loop involves caring for three different types of magical animals across multiple elemental themed levels, while also attending to customer’s needs and requests. To get a high score, the player has to carefully manage their costs (by selecting the right items for pets and customers quickly and efficiently) and maintain a high reputation (by attending to the pets’ needs quickly and efficiently). These values act as score multipliers at the end of each level, so players who can keep a cool head when everything’s getting frantic with pet and customer requests will be able to rocket up the leaderboards!

I joined the team in the last week of June, and the first major sprint week of the project. The Tranzfuser period lasts for 10 sprints, running from June 24th to September 1st. At the time of writing we’re currently on Sprint 5, about a third of the way through the project. At this point, the team are busy compiling a white-box test as a proof of concept piece.

On the audio side of things, so far I’ve designed ambient audio cues for each level, a musical theme for the main menu, a collection of UI sounds for gameplay menu navigation, and the dialogue emotes for the goblin customer NPCs.

With the development time left on the project, I need to record the remaining dialogue and sound effects for the pets creatures, complete sounds for the various player-controlled incidental sounds and finish the music for the gameplay levels and the score screen leaderboards.

As you can see, there’s a lot of things to do and not a lot of time to do them all in! As time is of the essence, I thought I’d make this a quick post to record what’s going on and where I’m currently up to in the Tranzfuser process.

Time to get back to making sounds…as fast as humanly possible!

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UCLAN Graduation - 16/07/19

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The big day has arrived. I’ve finally achieved my honours degree in Game and Interactive Audio!

Yesterday, I attended the UCLan graduation event in Preston, where after three years of hard work and study, I’m extremely pleased to say that I graduated from Futureworks and UCLan with a first-class honours degree. Get in!

My on-stage appearance is at 59:07!

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Field Recording - Chorlton Ees Nature Reserve 21/06/19

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I went to Chorlton Nature Reserve with Alex Larumbe and Aaron Taylor on Friday 21st June to record various natural ambience sounds. My original intention was for us to try and capture different bird ambiences, however on the day we actually ended up recording a bunch of different woodland foley sounds instead - things such as log impacts, twig snapping and foliage rustling.

Alex and me on our recording adventure!

We found a few of these cool wooden shelters at various points in the woods. Reminded me of the temporary structures you can build in The Forest!

We also got some good sounds from various metallic structures around the nature - e.g. squeaking metal hinges of the public footpath gates, and rattling of the rubbish bins - as well as some really great water sounds from the River Mersey which runs alongside the reserve.

Me busy coaxing some tasty squeaks and squeals out of a metal gate.

The River Mersey is right next to the nature reserve, so we stopped to capture some good water ambiences from it.

After a bit of a precarious climb down the side of the canal bank, we were able to get some good close-up sounds from the river as well.

On this trip we had to rely on just my Zoom H4n and Zoom H2n field recorders (as we sadly no longer have access to the treasure trove of mics and other field recording equipment at Futureworks now that I’ve finished my degree), but nonetheless I was still I was pleased with the quality of the recordings we were able to make using just the minimal kit I own.

My trusty H4n and H2n. Small, but mighty recorders!

Though the trees of reserve did soak up a lot of external noise, the distant roar of traffic could still be heard (particularly in the larger open field areas) and planes (presumably jetting off from Manchester airport) would pass by every now and again. Those caveats aside however, I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with the quality of sounds we were able to capture with this very budget setup.

I’ve still got to fully go through and clean up, edit and metadata-tag all the recordings from both recorders, but for now, here’s a video of some of the river ambiences we captured, plus some daft bonus footage of me frolicking and crunching around on twigs and branches. Enjoy!

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Futureworks Degree Show - 14/06/19

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Yesterday I attended the Futureworks degree show, and had an absolutely fantastic time!

My banner and stand at the Futureworks degree show, just before doors opened at 4! I presented my audio showreel alongside my Honours project, a full audio re-design for the Unity 3D Game Kit that uses both Unity’s audio engine and Audiokinetic’s Wwise.

It was a really great experience talking to the various recruiters and developers who attended the event, as well as a being a good opportunity to catch up my very talented coursemates and see all the amazing work and projects they’ve completed over the past three years.

While it’s sad on one hand that our time studying together at Futureworks is coming to an end (save for graduation ceremonies), it’s of course very exciting to see where everyone from our year goes from here. With the high level of talent and string work ethic on show yesterday however, I’m sure the 2019 graduates will go from strength to strength and find really cool opportunities in the industry in no time. Hurrah!

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Dry Ice Recording Session - Futureworks 07/06/19

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Brrr…I had a really fun (but chilly) recording session yesterday with Alex Larumbe and Adam Whitehead recording a variety of dry ice sounds in the Futureworks dialogue booth.

We recorded a whole bunch of great sounds with the dry ice by manipulating it in differernt ways - e.g. crushing it in our (gloved) hands, scraping it with metal objects, and dropping it into hot water to name just a few. It was quite amazing to hear the range of sounds we could produce just through these simple techniques alone; squeezing and crumbling the ice by hand produced subtle creaking and cracking effects, touching it against metal props made a variety of shrieks and squeals and submerging a whole block in hot water produced quite possibly the best bubbling magic cauldron sound I’ve ever heard! I’m looking forward to playing around with these recordings in Reaper to see how I can manipulate them further…once my hands have warmed up again of course!

Dangling this metal chain onto the dry ice sounded cool, but tightly wrapping and squeezing the chain against the ice block sounded even better!