Week 1 - Introduction to Sound & Action
Sounds are involved in our day-to-day lives: the sound of your breath, the footsteps you hear when you walk, or the rustle of wind stirring the leaves on a tree branch. In entertainment, sound gives depth and emotion to what the creator is trying to achieve and what they want the audience to experience. Movies use very quiet noises to make the experience fuller to their audience. Games use sound to give the experience originality and to help inform the player.
To kickstart this module, the first task we were assigned was listening to different environments throughout the uni campus (and 1 environment of our choice). Below is a list of the sounds I picked up.
Week 2 - Core Concepts
During the first half of the lecture, we studied some songs in class, such as:
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Do for love by 2pac
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I'm not your toy by La Roux
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Man Don't Care by Jme
In the 2nd half we decided to step it up a notch and study the audio in a cutscene from Metal Gear Solid 5 and the fight level against Gym Leader Raihan from the game Pokemon Sword & Shield. As an additional task, we had to analyse a scene from a game of our choice in our own time.
Below I will attach the notes I took for the exercises we did in class. I apologise for my messy handwriting or if the notes don't make sense, it's really hard to write down as quickly as you can as many sounds as you can hear, but I tried my best.
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water dripping from somewhere
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different types of footsteps for different types of ground
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objects on the floor being hit or moved by the cat (tin cans, glass bottles etc.)
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funky ambiental music that fits the sounds the companions (aka the robots) make
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UI sounds for when you find an interactable object + when you interact with it
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the drone's tiny motors when it activates
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the music changes when the cutscene starts, but you can still hear the water dripping through the station
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the station and underground train powering up
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sometimes you can hear a faint electrical buzz from the control panels and the fans
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train doors closing
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station door clanking when it opens
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the train sounds exactly like the London underground trains, especially when it brakes
Week 3 - Advanced Game Audio
For this session we had to think of an already existing game and try to make it accessible to blind people. Me and my team (Scott + Florin) chose Subway Surfers since it can't really be played by a blind person as it currently is. We came up with the following ideas;
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have each lane have a specific sound, so the player knows where they are (left lane would be footsteps on mud, middle would be footsteps on wood tracks and right would be footsteps on metal tracks)
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whenever a train would approach, you could hear it honking and getting lounder and louder as it gets closer, and even have the phone vibrate when it's about to hit the player
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same for the barriers you'd need to jump over or crawl under
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play a sound when you collect coins
What would be extremely challenging to accomplish would be:
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differentiate the barriers you jump over to the ones you crawl under
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let the player know when they approach a vagon you can climb on
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let the player know where the boosters are, how long they last etc.
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tell the player where the coins are on the map
Audio design & implementation
Once we got somewhat used to what sound design is and the programs used in the industry (like FMod and Audacity), it was time to start working on our assignment.
I chose to use one of the maps from the 4in1 Research Facility pack ( map 4 to be specific). As a bonus I also changed the player model from the basic one to the Sci-Fi Character 08 pack.
List of assets I would need:
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various footsteps sounds (concrete floor, metal floor, puddles)
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creepy ambience
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monster roars/screams
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electrical buzzing
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dripping
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heavy breathing when running
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breathing when idle
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various jump sfx
Once I acquired the needed sfx, I edited them in Audacity and FMod and created 2D and 3D events.
The full list with the links of the raw SFXs I gathered can be found here:
Using a parameter, I split the footsteps sfx in 3 categories based on the floor type: concrete, metal and puddle. With the help of multi instruments I can play a different sound randomly each time the
player takes a step, making it feel a bit more diverse this way.
In Unreal Engine, I implement the sounds using different trigger boxes for each floor type corresponding to the FMod parameter. I also had to create notifiers in the animation files for each footstep, as well as for the breathing so that the sound plays at the correct time.
Once most of the events were created, I had to make a Reverb snapshot that would allow me to make all the sounds echo-ish for one big and empty room in particular. The snapshot would automatically override all events associated to it and add a reverb filter to them instead of me having to do it all for each sfx and save it as a different version. To implement the snapshot, I had to use an Audio Volume in Unreal and make it the size of the room. I had to be careful with it as I did not want the reverb to be applied or bleed through outside of that room, but I also had to make sure I created a nice transition from no reverb to reverb and the other way around.
Below is the final result that I was able to achieve: