Gaming Audio - Red Square Map

 

This video example shows the sounds that I created for my final 'Advanced Interactive Audio' project. The list of sounds created were: Shock Rifle Weapon Sounds (purple in color), Ambience, Stingers (wolf howls, crickets), Portal Hum, Portal Use, Jump Pad Hum, Jump Pad Use, Ammo Pickups (green and purple in color), Door Open and Door Close sounds for the room where the portal is located.

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The initial setup of my shock rifle weapon sounds were done with the synthesizer ES P in Logic Pro 9. I created a sound I liked and then layered it with another version of the same sound. I then layered these sounds with lightening shocks and thunder bursts.  I also did further processing with tempo, speed, delays, reverb etc.

 

The ambience in the map was originally taken from a sound library but because it couldn't loop properly, I received help from my instructor to recreate the same type of ambience sound using Sound Forge and white noise. Most of my other sounds were taken from sound libraries like Logic Pro 9's sound library and freesound.org. They were then further processed with tempo, speed, delay, reverb, reverse effects, etc. Sounds such as my Stingers, Jump Pad Hum and Portal Hum as well as the Door Open and Door Close sounds were created in that method. The Portal Use and Jump Pad Use were created with a synthesizer initially and then the sounds were layered and processed.

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For the implementation side, Unreal Development Kit was used to implement the sounds. The sounds were imported into the content browser and saved as SoundNodeWave files. Sound Cues were also made for them. Some of the sounds already had preexisting Sound Cues so those wave files simply had to be switched out and replaced with the sounds I created. For the others, they were placed in their Sound Cues and those Sound Cues were triggered in the PlaySound Actor in Kismet, which is the back end of UDK where you can create events or actions to perform certain tasks in the game.

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​There were also some sounds like the Ambience and Stingers that were placed unto the map using objects called Actors eg. (AmbientSoundSimple).

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The music at the beginning of the map is a tune I created a little while back in Logic Pro 9. I placed the imported .WAV file into a PlaySound Action that was triggered to play when the level of the game loads.

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Overall, I think the audio elements I chose fit the map aesthetic or at least what I was going for with this Red Square map. I wanted to make the player feel like they were out in an environment at night that was possibly somewhere away from other life. For example, maybe they were in or near a facility in some forest or up in the mountains, hence, the wolf sounds and cricket sounds, which implied the area was very quiet at night. There was one thing I had some issue creating properly. My Portal Hum and Jump Pad Hum sounds didn't loop seamlessly for me but if and once I'm able, I plan to fix them to prevent any small clicks or pops. Other than that, I was generally pleased with how my map turned out.