GAME SOUND DESIGN REEL
My game sound design demo reel. Thanks for taking the time to listen! Lovingly crafted from synthesized, personally recorded, and library sounds I layered and processed and destroyed. And a couple of sounds recorded by my awesome sound designer wife on her travels in New Zealand. (Jealous.) Thanks to the zillions of creative, hard-working devs behind Bioshock, Half Life: Alyx, Destroy All Humans, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for such inspiring gameplay to put sound to.
HARE RUNNER (GAME JAM AUDIO LEAD)
I’d say the third time’s the charm, but… our first two Ludum Dare entries were pretty charmed already. You can read more about the current Sleepy Donut dev team’s first two efforts, Department of Demise and Asterisk, below. With a little personnel shuffle and a few talented additions, we just teamed up for Ludum Dare 52 to make yet another fun video game in 72 hours. Hare Runner is an addictive little auto-scrolling bullet hell where you, a cybernetically enhanced bunny in the year twenty-eighty-twelve… teen (?) must fight to harvest some of the few remaining vegetables—which have evolved sophisticated defense mechanisms. The ratings period should wrap up around the end of January and I’ll update here once we know how we placed. But most importantly, we’re proud of our work and had a GREAT time working together again. More wonky details forthcoming on the blog!
Play it now on Itch! And here’s a little trailer, cut together by one of our composers, Alexa Thanos, with VO by sound + music man Michael Spencer:
DEPARTMENT OF DEMISE (GAME JAM AUDIO LEAD)
The same team that made Asterisk (see below), which grew out of the Ludum Dare 48 game jam, got together for LD50 and made another awesome little game: Department of Demise. In this little plate-spinner you are a Junior Associate Grim Reaper, going about your mundane daily life in the office, micro-managing the lives and deaths of humans based on their choices—good (e.g., eat a salad) and bad (e.g., play with explosives).
I was, once again, audio lead on a really super little team. And we are, once again, very proud of the results: A 3rd place in audio out of almost 2,000 submissions, and top-5% rankings in several other categories! Geekier details on the blog.
ASTERISK (GAME JAM AUDIO LEAD)
My first game jam was the Ludum Dare 48 game jam and it was a huge success! I was audio lead, dialogue designer, mixer, and one of three sound designers on a team of five awesome audio folks partnered up with a fantastic programmer and a wonderful pixel artist. Together, in 72 hours, we made Asterisk.
Go have a play of the game jam version, bugs and all. WebGL, PC, and Mac versions available here:
We chose Fmod with a Unity integration, and GitHub for version control. I did some sidechaining for the mix, as well as to feed a dialogue glitching system. The dialogue, futzed to be coming from your space helmet, gets more distortion and dropouts the deeper you dig from the surface of the asteroid, and there are plenty of randomized elements. We implemented the music progression and a few of the sound effects to also respond to the player’s depth. You can read more about the whole thing on my blog.
THIRTY SECONDS OF SOUND DESIGN FROM ONE SOURCE SOUND
A fantastic animation by cyberpunk artist RA — whom you can find at opacity.ru and as @tema_ra on Twitter. I’m grateful to him for letting me share my take on his work. Every sound you hear in this is derived from one recording of me hitting a metal water bottle with a plastic cooking spoon once. I mangled this one impact sound in a zillion ways, arriving at this soundscape that supports the story I see being told.
Explainer video diving into sound design techniques, tricks, and plug-ins:
AMBIENCE DESIGN AND UNREAL BLUEPRINT IMPLEMENTATION
This one’s an exercise in designing ambiences using this sci-fi level from Unreal (by Denys Rutkovski, go see his stunning sci-fi artwork on ArtStation). These are a combination of synthesized, library, and personally recorded sounds, layered and processed in Pro Tools, and implemented directly into Unreal Engine using Blueprint. I turned off footsteps so you can hear the rest.
I decided I wanted some kind of dynamic visual elements in the level, so aside from changing all the lights’ colors, I programmed in some flickering and added some smoke, steam, and sparks here and there. Oh, and an occasional reactor overload. =) As you travel through the level you hear area loops, source loops, random one-shot systems in Blueprint, sounds associated with the light flicker and reactor overload visuals via a “custom tick” timer system in Blueprint, some different flavors of random pitch and volume modulation, a variety of attenuations and occlusion, and reverbs associated with audio volumes. There is also a randomization system running a futzy, glitchy PA announcement.
You can see some of my approach, techniques, choices, and challenges in this breakdown video: