Game Audio

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School of Video Game Audio - Student Success Newsletter Feature

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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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Victor's Vector - UE4 Summer Jam 2019

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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!

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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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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!