DESIGN GOALS & TAKEAWAYS
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The purpose of this project was to design and develop a polished and engaging demo with a group of students. The hope was to teach a young audience programming logic through gameplay.
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One of my personal goals was to learn sound design and music composition skills that would give me a variety of skills. It was to also learn how to use WWISE in a team setting and to create a structured workflow for my team and I to use.
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I improved my sound design skills by researching games and through hands on experience during the development cycle of the game
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I improved my music composition skills by revisiting music theory and analyzing music sound tracks to get an idea of the theme and vision I wanted to replicate. This also improved my skills with using a DAW (FL Studio)
SOUND DESIGNER & COMPOSER
Below you can find an overview of my responsibilities as the Sound designer and music composer of the project along with a few examples of my work.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
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Create an audio design document that would communicate the game's audio vision and to have a consistent theme
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Updated the sound asset list provided by producers to stay on track of work
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Creating and sourcing sound assets to be used for the game
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Creating music tracks in FL studio for the game and trailer. This also includes separating the tracks into their respective stems.
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Implementing WWISE with Unreal and create a stable audio pipeline
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Using Unreal Engine 4's blueprints to implement audio and music in the engine
RESEARCH
I broadly researched two types of different games to create a theme that would fit project scrapped.
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I studied games that were cute and were considered open world games.
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The second type of games were those that had core mechanics or gameplay featured around their UI.
Some examples of those games were: Tunic, Glitch Space, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon and Animal Crossing.
I also had to research the software that I was using. I needed to find resources that helped me in using WWISE as well as how to implement it with Unreal Engine 4
PLANNING AND PROTOTYPE WORK
After doing my research I created an audio design document to help communicate my vision. I also established a sound design and music pipeline that I would use throughout the semester. When I had established those pipelines I worked out in detail how to set up the WWISE Pipeline and how I would use it to implement audio into the engine
For the project I went through multiple iterations of sounds and music to figure out what best fit the game. All of the audio that would go into the game was first categorized by a system that the team leads had laid out.
All sounds / music I found, would be uploaded onto the google drive and from there would be implemented into WWISE and the engine.
I would also update the asset list depending on the state of the sound.
SOUND DESIGN WORK
All the sounds were categorized and stored based on their type.
Ambient sounds were mostly found online and edited in WWISE. They all have 3D attenuation and are soft sounds that add life to the world.
Character sounds included all the sounds the characters (Excluding the player) make in the game. This included all the dialogue voices,
character footsteps, any actions or special effects they make/do.
Originally, when creating the dialogue voices, I had created a
single event for every character voice. But that wasn’t very optimized and as the dialogue system became larger, I had to change how the dialogue played as well. After discussing it with the
programmers, I made a single event that contained the data of all the dialogue voices and then used a switch to change the voice that can be changed freely in the engine.
Gameplay sounds is audio that the player interacts with or are
gameplay objects in the scene. Button sounds were kept in gameplay folders. There were supposed to be teleporters and other interactable objects as well, but were removed after re-scoping.
Player sounds are all the sounds that the player made. These include, footsteps, dialogue and landing sound effects. Originally, there would be ranged combat in the game so there were damage sounds and bow sounds. But that was later cut to keep the game simpler.
There are different materials in the world, ranging from sand, grass, stone etc. An audio system was created to have the footsteps dynamically react to the material the player steps on. A switch was set up in WWISE that would then change the sounds based on the physical material the character stepped on.
Unlike the other sounds, UI is one of the few sound effects that are 2D throughout the game. UI sounds consist of the Main menu and all of the logic nodes that the player can interact with and place.
Visual effects sounds are the sound effects that were meant to reward/ guide the player. Sound effects such as the player getting a clue right, getting the puzzle correct or glow sounds for pickups.
3D Attenuation was important here because it alerted players if they were close to a pickup and by making it a 3D sound, players could figure out in which direction the pickup was. 3D Attenuation was trial and error and finding the perfect distance for the sounds required a lot of number tweaking.
MUSIC COMPOSITION WORK
Music would be the background audio that is heard throughout the level. It’s meant to create a mood and for the game, I had to compose multiple different tracks to fit different areas. I also went through many iterations of music.
A dynamic music system was also implemented to create an immersive experience that fit with the world. There would be triggers for each of the areas that would seamlessly transition the music from one song to another. There was also an additional feature added, where if the player was in range of a puzzle, the music would muffle itself to allow the player to focus on the player. If they stepped out of the puzzle, it would return to normal.
To showcase all the music I made, I’ve made music videos with audio visualizers to showcase them. You can find all of the videos on YouTube under the game’s official channel.
Project Scrapped OST
Project Scrapped OST
Village Theme Official
Mountains Theme
Forest Music
GAME DESIGNER
Below you can find an overview of my responsibilities as a game designer for the project during the early stages
RESPONSIBILITIES:
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Helped in early core gameplay concept brainstorming
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Assisted in early prototyping stages and discussion of the player goals and objectives
POST MORTEM
WHAT WENT RIGHT?
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During production, I always had a set goal and planning thanks to the producers and leads.
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I was able to work clearly and efficiently throughout the project with my teammates and go through multiple iterations and testing before settling on good audio choices.
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The audio sourcing and music composing went well as well since I had to find free audio samples and even though this was my first time composing this much music, my previous music theory lessons and game references from earlier research were able to guide me.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
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What went wrong during the project was mostly technical rather than creative. With me using WWISE for the first time in Unreal and with GitHub not being very compatible with Unreal engine, there were issues that popped up that were often demotivating.
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There were certain aspects of WWISE that had to be fine tuned to Unreal which I was not aware of earlier on in the project. When the audio was sounding strange or was not working, I often struggled earlier on to figure out what the issues were.
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There were times as well, when WWISE would cause some issues in source control. Certain WWISE project files would get corrupted and it required me to stop my work entirely and fix these issues.
HOW WE OVERCAME THEM
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Thankfully, I had a good team and many information sources that came through.
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There were some tutorials on YouTube for WWISE and Unreal integration which were helpful and for extreme fine tuning that the engine needed, I often turned to WWISE forums and Audio focused discords to get the help I needed.
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Regarding, source control, I overcame it by relying on my team. My team had worked with GitHub and Unreal earlier and by working with them, I was able to fix the issues that arrived with WWISE and eventually came out with my own method of fixing WWISE source control issues.
WHAT I LEARNT
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From an audio perspective, I’m very proud of how the game has come together. The sound design and music makes the game feel cute and lively while also feeling full and expansive. Every action in the game has a sound and it makes the experience feel very real.
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From testing and feedback sessions, it’s usually very difficult to grasp what is good audio design as players don’t comment on it, but it’s very easy to pick out bad audio design as they stick out to the player. Personally, for this project, I’m very happy with the music and how I’ve set up all of the sounds to work in a 3D space.