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.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tom Bennett (@tombennettaudio)

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

Futureworks Game & Interactive Audio Tutor

I am delighted to say that I have started a new role as a tutor at Futureworks!

As part of Futureworks’ school of Sound & Music, I am teaching the Interactive Mixing and Engines and Middleware 2 & 3 modules of the Game & Interactive Audio degree course.

It truly means a lot to me that I have been asked to be part of Futurework’s teaching staff and help guide new and upcoming sound designers through the course. I thoroughly enjoyed my time studying game audio at Futureworks as a student, so to be able to contribute to the learning experiences of current students as a module tutor is a big personal honour.

School of Video Game Audio - Unity Course Projects

Here’s a few video clips from some of the projects I’ve been working on throughout July and August while studying on the School of Video Game Audio’s Unity course.

Grenadier Footstep Sound Re-Design

Grenadier Grenade Sounds Re-Design

Viking Village Water Submersion Toggle

dBs Interview - Specialising in Sound Design

I was recently interviewed by Chris Mackin from Bristol’s dBs institute as part of an article about specialising in sound design.

You can read the piece here, where I talk briefly about discovering that sound design was actually a thing, and how finding out that the sound on TV programmes like Blue Planet would be added later in post (and not recorded live at the scene) was a big and inspiring revelation!

Found Sounds - A Field Recording Bitsy Game

I’m currently in the early stages of making a Bitsy game!

I recently got introduced to Bitsy through the works of Cecile Richard, and found them to be really cool and moving experiences. I was particularly impressed by how evocative and immersive Bitsy games can be; the limited mechanical and technical restrictions of the Bitsy editor are positive creative constraints for a game designer wanting to make really unique narrative experiences.

After my initial exposure to this exciting new world of Bitsy games, I felt inspired to start making one myself…and so I did! While having a mess around in the Bitsy editor to get a feel for making basic tile and sprite assets, my mind wandered back to the announcement trailer for the upcoming game Season, which has this really cool opening sequence of the player character recording the sounds of a nearby dragonfly.

Although the use of microphones as a gameplay mechanic is not particularly new, they’re often used as a means of boosting the player’s auditory percepttion or awareness (the directional mic in Metal Gear Solid 2 + 3 is a good example of this), rather than as a means of capturing or cataloguing the environmental sounds happening around the player. With these thoughts in mind and taking a hefty dose of inspiration from Season, I thought that making a small game based around field recording could lend itself well to making for a short, fun and personal Bitsy game experience.

So, here’s what I’ve got planned out so far. The rough structure I have in mind is to have the player start by checking in with their game dev team to see what sounds they need for their project, before collecting their equipment and heading outdoors to start recording. I’m thinking of having the player go to visit three different locations, where they have to record a sound from the environment. Once all the required sounds have been captured, the player then heads back to their studio computer in order to upload their sounds into the game. Here’s the opening scene of the player’s room/studio:

The player’s humble abode, complete with field recorder, headphones, microphone and batteries on the right. I need to change the field recorder sprite (top) to look more distinct from the batteries (bottom).

I want to make this a highly-idealised and rose-tinted view of a typical day of freelance game audio, so there’s no software crashes to worry about, or pesky version control software issues to wrestle with. Instead, it’s all about trying to capture that joy and excitement of exploring the outdoors with a recorder in-hand and having lots fun and Bob Ross' style happy accidents along the way!

I’m still learning the tools and editor workflow (and crucially, the audio implementation) as I go, so progress will likely be a bit on the slow side for the time being, but I’ll aim to post (hopefully timely) updates on Twitter/Instagram every now and then once I’ve completed a new section of the game or made a decent chunk of new progress. The aim is to keep this as small and tightly hemmed in scope-wise as possible so that I can actually complete it!