This project started as a soundtrack task for a friend, and became my exit project for university. When asked to produce a track to suit a trailer for an adventure dinosaur game, I created a triumphant orchestral piece that matched the time cues of the footage and features a blend of sound effects at the end, to create a dinosaur roar. The aim of this piece was to enhance the visuals, creating a well rounded trailer for the game as a university submission.
Game Trailer
After working on this game play, I developed an interest in sound for game, and decided to create and implement sounds into this build as my university exit project.
Gameplay Footage
After sourcing the game build, I stripped out certain components. Removing the dinosaurs, progression elements and base building left me with a stunning map and the ability to explore it. This was the basis of my project, to take this game build and fill it with atmospheric sounds to create an immersive environment for the player.
This project allowed me to put into practice many skills I had read about and studied. The footstep sounds were recorded at pre-determined locations following research on the terrain required. I layered and edited these sounds to create two distinct terrains, sand and dirt. These were assigned to box colliders through Wwise so that while the player wandered the beaches, sand footsteps played, but as they went inland, the sounds were layered with dirt and grass type sounds. This simple change brings a lot to the immersion of the map and this method can be used on a much larger scale with relative ease.
I created a fire sound using bubble wrap and a plastic bottle, as well as blowing on a condenser microphone. This was carefully edited and layered to create the standing torch sounds as the player leaves the cabin. I took care in making this sound as warm as possible in atmosphere but also to make the sound loop perfectly so that the player could stand around the torch for as long as desired without them hearing the loop or needing a very long audio file.
Atmospheric ambiences were recorded in a variety of locations. I travelled to Highgate Wood to record the forest ambiance, Brighton beach to record the sea ambience and open fields nearby to capture clean audio of birds. These recordings were very rough when recorded, requiring lots of filtering to remove unwanted frequencies and background noise. This was due to poor weather and was unfortunately out of my control.
All of these audio files were cleaned using Audacity, edited on Logic Pro and implemented into Unity via Wwise
