Bone Voyage

Responsibilities

Setting up Wwise and integrate it into an Unreal Engine 4 project

For Bone Voyage me and two other Sound Designers spend our time integrating Wwise into our Unreal Project. This was achieved using the existing integration system available through the installation of a plugin and connecting the projects within the same folder path. Our mean reason for making use of Wwise was to increase flexibility in production and allowing us improved audio functionality where Unreal’s audio system would be lacking.

Another task was to make the Wwise project available for source control, for which we used Perforce. Having set up the Wwise project we made sure to upload the files to Perforce. However, the source files were not made available to the rest of the team for the fear of overexposure to placeholder and other poorly developed sound effects.

Developing gameplay and ambient sound effects

For the project I spend quite a lot of time working on concept pieces in order to support the team in developing the concept for the project as a whole. I found it a great opportunity for me to practice with rapid iterations, working on the various short concept pieces, and let my team members having direct input into style of the audio. The main reasons behind working on these concepts pieces was that it more quickly allowed me to establish a style for the audio and it kept me more directly involved into the development of the overall concept.

I also found great enjoyment in the process of the developing the sound effects. I adhered to a strict process of creating prototypes first and developing on top of them. This worked perfect as it allowed me to create whole ranges of audio within a shorter time and it gave me the time and space to spend a significant amount of time on improving the sound effects.

Implementing 300+ unique sound effects Into UE4

For Bone Voyage we’ve been able to implement an excess of 300+ unique sound effects into the project with randomization resulting in a collection of over a 1000 possible effects playing in game.

With the Wwise integration we were able to implement a more flexible sound system into Bone Voyage. This allowed us to only have to create a smaller selection of sound effects that would be mixed by Wwise and result in a significantly larger variety of sounds.

The goal with this approach was to create as much variety in sound effects as possible to prevent annoyance the player may experience with being overexposed to the same sound effects and prevent listeners fatigue.

Setting Up Audio Design Document

For this project I also spend a significant amount of time on the documentation with the creation of an audio design document, high level plan and audio design bible. This work also involved quite some research which was great as it gave me some more time to learn more about audio design before actually getting to work.

The documentation was done and completed during pre-production, which worked out really well because it allowed us to entirely focus on the sound design itself.

This worked incredibly well for us because we had already completed the documentation during the pre-production we could just focus on the sound design. With the documentation we were also able to establish a clear vision for the project with a clear point of references for outsiders or if there was any confusion.

Skills & Experience

VISUAL PROGRAMMING | AUDIO DESIGN | AUDIO SYNCING | SOURCE CONTROL | AUDIO MIXING | AUDIO ENGINEERING | SOUND EDITING

Achievements & Responses