Game & Sound Design
As somebody who was holding a SNES controller before I could form conscious memories, and whose interest in music was initiated almost entirely by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I owe video games quite a debt.
Having minored in game design for my undergraduate degree, and currently specializing in game audio for my Master’s in Music Technology, I’ve become fascinated with sound and adaptive music system implementation, and how they can serve and elevate the design principles of a game. Below are some examples of my work to this end.
Custom Adaptive Music System: Wwise Adventure Game
In this video (which has been featured by AudioKinetic on the Wwise website), I discuss a variety of approaches I’ve taken to revise and build upon the adaptive music system within the Wwise Adventure Game, utilizing changes within the Wwise Editor, Unity project, and its C# scripts. Most notably, I’ve designed a hybrid transition system between regions which combines both vertical mixing and horizontal re-sequencing techniques, allowing for immediate establishment of a region’s identity through change in background arrangement, while still allowing melodic phrases to fully play out before transitioning into the new region’s theme. (Click here for an abridged playthrough without commentary.)
Harmony-Tracking Musical Sound Design in Breakout
In this video, I discuss the theory and implementation behind a system for harmony-tracking musical sound design which I’ve created in a remake of the game Breakout, first using only Unity and C# scripts, then replicating and expanding upon the system using Wwise, still including additional C# implementation for custom note-sequencing behavior. At the end, I also touch upon some of the non-musical sound design implemented to combine with this system for the full mix.
Ambient Sound Design Techniques Showcase (Unity & C# Scripts)
In this video, I showcase some ambient sound design I’ve implemented within the Old Sea Port environment, as well as a variety of scripting approaches I’ve used to implement it. (I’ve also taken advantage of Oculus VR integration in this project for use of their HRTFs in audio source localization, but this video will not be going into the details of that integration.)
Project Radical Adventure
Project Radical Adventure (working title) is a 3D platformer on which I’m working in collaboration with developer Zac Singer. In this video, I briefly showcase a variety of Unity-and-C#-only sound design and music implementation strategies I’ve employed, after which I go into more detail on one particular approach, where I’ve set up transition behavior between two parallel stems of different tempo for the pause music.
Soundtoy Prototype
WaveForm (working title) is a soundtoy game which I’ve been building from the ground up. Utilizing the Wwise SynthOne plugin, it allows the player to set shapes onto the play area, upon which they play a note when hit, with synth parameters determined by the shapes’ color and roundness (visually set using procedural mesh rendering). Additional details and downloadable builds of this game are available on Itch.