My Game Audio Adventure - Part 3 — Haroon Thantrey

Hello again, for part 3, I'll continue where i left off, by talking about the next room in my implementation. In case you haven't read part two, a video and playable build of what i'm about to discuss can be found over at my Portfolio page.

The Radio

For this room i placed a radio in a wooden room that upon approach is emitting static, but can be tuned four different stations.

To set up the tuning i made it so pressing the J and K keys tuned the frequency up and down values between 0 and 100 by making them activate a timeline that linearly went up between those values. This float was then fed into a RTPC value which controlled what happened as you scrolled through the Freq.

From here the RTPC data went to a blend container which featured random containers of static noise as well as music for stations ( a big thank you to Katie Tarrant for letting me use some of her compositions). These crossfaded in and out of the static in order to recreate tuning in and out of a radio station.

I also included a sine wave that modulated rapidly and erratically in pitch to emulate the sound of the frequency band that you can sometimes hear on old radios. It was also in volume whenever a song would be present. When combined all together i feel this gave a pretty good radio for players to tune.

Haunted Room

For the final room in my level i decided to create a way to have audio radio generate around the player in order to make them a little unsettled. For this i decided to use a creepy treated voice whispering. After recording several whispered phrases i used Waves' Doubler and SoundToys' Crystallizer plugins in order to manipulate the sound into something otherworldly and sinister, yet indecipherable.

With the sounds created it was now time to create the way they would spawn and generate around the player. I did this using the following in the Level Blueprint;

This worked by taking the players location and adding random stream value between 500 and -500 to the X and Y values which created an area around the player which sounds could be played at. These were triggered at random times between 2 and 5 seconds to increase the unpredictability. These all triggered a Sound Cue that randomly selected a different voice snippet each time it was called upon. This effect was particularly effective on headphones where the localisation of the sounds in UE4 can sound behind and above the player.

Guns Guns Guns.

At the end of my level is a door that requires a big button press to open. Once inside you'll find a little shooting range. At the end of this are 3 target blocks made of Metal, Glass and Wood. These emit sounds when hit with bullet impacts which were triggered off using the following basic Blueprint.

For the Gun selection i decided to include 3 different models;

A Rifle
A Charging Grenade Launcher
A Machine Gun

Rifle

For the Rifle i used a Wwise sequence container that contained 3 Random Containers that each held different parts of a gunshot. One for the Transient, Body and Tails. Then the sequence container quickly cycled through all 3 with a rapid crossfade to create a varied gunshot sound.

Grenade Launcher

For this is used timelines and sound containers in UE4s audio engine. A looping drone is playing constantly at a low volume and upon holding down the firing button the timeline is triggered and ramps up the pitch and volume over a 2 second period until it holds a tone. Then upon release a firing sound is triggered and a grenade is fired which explodes a few moments later. Then the pitch and volume of the drone is reversed down to simulate a charge down.This was all achieved using the following Blueprint;

Machine Gun

This was achieved using Wwise switch containers and RTPC as well as UE4 timelines. The Blueprint looks like this:

Holding the fire button triggered a custom event that after allowing 2 seconds for a charge up, triggered a function every 0.1 seconds that fired a bullet. That function contained the following:

In here a Wwise event was posted every time that played the Machine Gun Container. Also the ammunition counter reduced by 1. This was used to trigger the Wwise switch using RTPC data so that when the ammo hit 0 the bullet sound would stop firing and a dry click would trigger instead.

Also featured during this is a charge up that simulates the motor of a machine gun kicking in. this was done using a UE4 timeline to push out an increasing float value over 2 seconds and have that tied to the pitch of a charge up container via RTPC, which featured a looping mechanical sound. This was also reversed upon release to simulate the motor winding down.

The Charge up of Volume and Pitch in Wwise

And that Ladies and Gentlemen marks the end of my Game Audio adventure, the first chapter at least. From here i intend to grow and develop this Interactive Demo Reel, by adding and refining elements as my skills in Game Audio develop. If you've read all of these thank you very much and i hope they were interesting.

Next I'll blog about my linear post production work, but maybe after some deadlines at uni pass.

Thanks once again!

Haroon