PANOS VLACHAKIS
CASUAL GAME AUDIO DEMO
Audiokinetic Wwise integration with Unreal Engine.
The idea came to me when I was looking to familiarize myself with Unreal engine and Wwise. My main objective here was to create a coherent audio story that would resemble a mobile game. I created this demo point-click top-down game from scratch with simple content and graphics. Since I am a sound designer I wanted to focus more on interactive sound. I used all technics and blueprint coding I knew and learned so many more things.
Level design
It took me a few iterations to develop all flora, rocks, sea, sand, and grass. Of course, since my goal was to promote the audio and not the graphics I used simple materials.
The three different flavors of ambiance
My main target for the level ambiance was to create a unified but diverse ambiance that consisted of the area in the middle where the tent and the firepit, the seaside, and the jungle are. That meant (conceptually at least) that the ambiance needed to vary from light and cheerful near the sea to thick and adventurous in the deep jungle. If you see carefully only the sea and jungle ambiance have attenuation curves. That means the basic ambiance in the middle always plays. Along with the sea ambiance, I filtered out some of the low frequencies of the main ambiance. The Jungle ambiance introduces these lower frequencies along the main ambiance to create a thick, humid jungle environment.
The seawaves random containers and their attenuation curves
My approach for the seawaves sounds was to be audible only near the sea, so I placed a wall from the same random container. Then through Wwise and attenuation curves, I fixed them in a way that the player could not hear them if he was next to the fire.
Deep water footsteps
Since I like details, I wanted to give more to the player's immersion. When the player enters the sea and based on his location (near the beach or deeper ) he could hear two types of footsteps. I placed a trigger that would open and close the code for deep water footsteps.
Coding deepwater footsteps
Here we see a code that takes the variable of how close to the end of the trigger the player is and controls a dual volume RTPC in Wwise.
Scattered triggers
While footsteps are changing based on physical materials that have been placed on the ground plains (grass, sand, water) I wanted to add one-shot triggers when the player would pass through shrubs.
Sound effects structure
Hierarchically all SFX have been placed under SFX audio bus. In that manner, I could link this volume to a widget fader and have control of all SFX in case the player or I wanted to lower the volume or mute them. Each actor then includes sub-actors that are classified per category eg. character, environment, actions, tasks etc.
Music states
I decided to use two different themes. The main theme would change by triggering states and I would add layers (vertical resequencing). If the player would head to the sea the music would be lighter, joyful, and melodic. If the player headed to the jungle the same theme would change to rhythmic and adventurous layers. The other theme would be only for the part where the player would go to the "natives' area" where the theme would be symbolic with percussions. The yellowish rectangles are triggering states of music.
Music states in Wwise
The music structure has been placed under the audio bus so that the volume could be controlled by the player via a widget. Switches control the state of the music based on the triggers we saw above. Simple, efficient, and immersive.
