Projects
“Future City Slum” (2024)
Unreal Engine
As part of my MSc course, I was tasked with designing and implementing sound into a scene using Unreal Engine’s native audio capabilities.
Metasounds were used throughout, for applications ranging from footsteps to a speech vocalisation system akin to ‘Animal Crossing’. One highlight is the adaptive rain system used to differentiate indoor and outdoor states, with rain able to be convincingly heard coming from portals such as windows and doors when inside and enveloping the player when outside.
Technical Walkthrough
The following video provides an in-depth walkthrough of the level, explaining audio systems as they are encountered in sequence.
“Blast from the Past” (2023)
Unity + FMOD
As the theme for the 2023 Global Game Jam was “Roots”, our team, made up of final-year university students, immediately thought of “Ancestry” … and “Root Beer”.
‘Blast from the Past’ is a first-person shooter in which you play a time-travelling cowboy protecting their family’s root beer factory from hordes of root beer-hating aliens.
Unity and FMOD were utilised for the project, with GitHub used for version control.
Dynamic Music
As there are two distinct game states, I decided to implement a music track that transitions smoothly between the two. While the main melodies and instrumental build-ups are shared, swapping guitars for synths gives each time period its distinct sound. FMOD region and transition markers were used to plan and plot the music progression.
The music gets more intense the more aliens that are alive, and transitions accordingly using two parameters: Time (Past or Future) and Threat Level (Low, Medium, or High).
Sound Design
With the player’s ability to switch between two distinct time periods at will, a clear duality was present in the game between a spaghetti western past and cyberpunk future.
As our audio team was made up of two people, tasks could be divided evenly, with myself ending up working mostly on the future sounds.
“Snail Trail” (2022)
Unity + FMOD
As part of my undergraduate Sound Engineering course, I completed a module focused on audio for games in collaboration with students studying Computer Games courses.
Our team decided to pursue adding sound to a simple horror game, knowing the pivotal role of audio to the gameplay experience in the genre. The game has the player collect crystal pieces while being chased by a killer snail, allowing plenty of emergent opportunities for audio implementation.
Unity was used in conjunction with FMOD for the project, with Plastic SCM used for version control.
Spatial Sources
Four empty game objects were attached to the player to serve as spatial sources, ideal for emitting leaves rustling overhead as part of the forest ambience.
The sources could also be triggered using box colliders for dynamic orchestrated scares around the map, which make it easier for sound to be emitted from a specific direction without the need for additional sound source objects placed around the world.
Trigger Pairs
Having identified that sounds were often triggered linearly using box colliders, a prefab was made consisting of an empty trigger and an attached sound source.
A script was then attached to the collider, allowing the control of various parameters, including functionality that allows the sound source to move in a pre-determined direction for added realism.
