Two Semesters, Two Projects: Lessons Learned in Game Audio

Over the last two semesters, I’ve been the composer and sound designer for two separate game projects. The first, tentatively known as Escapism, is an ongoing project as part of Microsoft’s Unity Game Camp. Essentially, it was a 6-month-long game jam in which many different professionals of many different disciplines all got together to form teams to create games. Each team had a mentor from Microsoft, someone who already had experience in the games industry, to oversee their project and provide feedback. You can read more about Microsoft and Unity’s Game Camp here.

By the end of that 6-month period, we had a working vertical slice of our project. Now that Game Camp is over, many on the team, including myself, decided to continue working on Escapism to turn it into a full product. As such, I’ll have more updates as time goes on, but for now I still have a lot to talk about with this project.

The second project was for my capstone course as part of my Experimental Music degree at LSU. It was called Puzzle Plane, and it was made over a much shorter time of a semester with a smaller team of students.

Escapism is a dark, first-person survival-horror game, while Puzzle Plane is a lighthearted 2D puzzle game, so, between the two of them, the goals for sound design and composition are very different. With that said, a lot of what I learned from each was transferrable to the other, since I used many of the same tools for each.

I feel like this needs some explanation, so here’s a list of the tools I used most between both of these projects:
-DAW: Ableton Live
-Game Engine: Unity
-Audio Middleware: FMOD Studio
-Version Control: GitHub
-Sample Library: Splice

Basically, my workflow looked like this: I’d compose music in Ableton and export a wav. Then, I’d import that wav into FMOD Studio and implement any special behaviors I wanted for the music. From there, I’d build the FMOD project for Unity and put scripts in the Unity project to trigger the FMOD events.

For sound effects, I’d sometimes find Foley sounds on Splice that I could manipulate with Ableton. More, often, though, I’d make my own Foley sounds, or for interface sounds, I’d use synthesizers. I’ll speak more on the sound design aspect later, but for now, I want to focus on music.

Escapism Sound

The first of these projects I started work on was Escapism. In terms of big-picture plans, my team talked about a narrative which involved unraveling the mystery of what turns out to be a mother figure to the player character. This mother figure would initially be an ever-present, seemingly hostile force. In keeping with this, I devised this motif that would hang over several of the tracks I would compose for the soundtrack:

It’s a gloomy motif that matches the initially hostile and unwelcoming presence of the mother figure as was planned in the narrative. Given the importance of this character, I decided to use the motif for the title theme, heard here:

This is, of course, only a small snippet of the overall soundtrack, but, hopefully, it conveys what I want the overall soundtrack to sound like. I envision Escapism’s sound as awash with dark, brooding synth textures. I’d like these textures to add to the oppressively lonely atmosphere inherent to a survival-horror game, as well as compliment the otherworldly nature of many of the game’s planned encounters. To that end, I use many synths with chorus, multiple delay lines, and reverb all at once. I’m still experimenting with it to get it just right, but the whole thing has given me a lot of experience, as I’ve had to compose many different tracks for different situations while still having all of them fit into the same timbral and stylistic color palette. Here’s one of the tracks I feel is most successful at doing that:

This was my idea for a theme for the an electrical utility room in the game. The main “melody” isn’t a melody at all, but instead a randomized arpeggio on my Arturia MicroFreak. It floats on top of a synth pad, with a piano to accentuate chord changes. It starts with a harsh minor chord, underscoring the harsh, “industrial”-ness of the room. Gradually, more colorful chords are added to add a sense of wonder to the strange electrical devices in the room.

As you may notice, this track starts with a long drone section, which leads me to talking about audio implementation. The plan for the game is to have an underground research facility with multiple floors, each floor having a variety of different rooms. Initially, my plan was to create a theme for each individual room, with the music from room to room transitioning seamlessly. So, with that in mind, I added a drone to the beginning of each room theme to create an area where that transition can happen easily. More recently, I realized this plan wasn’t feasible, but I’ve still salvaged part of it.

Above is the FMOD Project file for the track I linked earlier. The track starts off on the drone, and it’s programmed to loop the drone forever. That is, until the “progress” parameter I set up goes to 1 from 0. At that point, the drone gradually fades out, and the main material fades in and loops. I’d like to have the drone be the initial state of the music, with no transition happening until the player does something, like turn on a light to light up the room.

While I don’t have as much built up in terms of sound effects yet, I do have a few tricks for this project. For instance, here’s a screenshot of the footstep event in FMOD.

I had three separate sound effects for footsteps, so, in order to vary the sound with every footfall, I set up an FMOD instrument to randomly pick one of the three each time a footfall is detected.

Puzzle Plane Sound

First off, I’d like to show this video, depicting all of the music and all of its behavior in the game.

This game is a game that consists of several small minigames. The player starts in a small area, but as they complete minigame, this area expands. To complement this, the main level them has a “progress” parameter tied to it. As the area expands, this parameter increases, and the arrangement shifts to being more filled out. I tried to make the level theme playful and childlike, but also mysterious. In addition to this level theme, there is a short theme for each minigame. When the player plays a minigame, the “minigame” parameter goes to a specific value, causing the track to jump to the corresponding minigame theme. When the player is finished, the “minigame” parameter goes back to 0 and gradually fades back to a specific point in the level theme. If the player was successful, the “progress” parameter also goes up by 1, and the arrangement evolves more.

These two projects have been a great learning experience for me, and I’m really looking forward to working more on refining Escapism’s sound.