#lead audio

Coming into Vertical Slice, I had big intentions of taking the audio to a level unreached by any of the prototyping phases, and followed up with research into the appropriate inspirations and having had some ideas about composition. Unfortunately, due to the tremendous workload as Lead Programmer, composition took to the backburner and as time went on the likelihood of being able to compose a unique BGM for the game became slim.

Early on, I added placeholder audio to the system, intending to replace the current clips with revised clips that were either more appropriate to the game world or immersion otherwise. In the end, these audio clips have become our final audio clips. The background music tracks contained in the game are the Boulders music from Crash Bandicoot (PS) in the main menu and a remix of the Bone Yard music from Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (PS) for the main game. Most of the sound effects, with the noticable exception of the losing horn from the game show The Price Is Right, were generated at http://www.bfxr.net.

It’s disappointing to not have achieved my goals in this role. However, I have learned a great deal from the experience and am confident in my now ability to implement an effective audio system for any future projects later on down the line. In addition, I believe I have gone in my role beyond beyond what was previously established by other team members and myself during the prototyping phases. I feel I have performed adequately in this role, despite not having reached my own personal goals, and will be interested to working with audio inside game development in the future.

With my secondary role as Lead Audio for Vertical Slice development, I was determined to implement audio better than had been implemented during the prototyping process. It is my intention to compose unique audio for the game and source sound effects from royalty-free sources to deliver a suitable audio environment that is both immersive to the environment and the game world.

Given that our game’s visual theme was that of exploration in a Mayan Jungle environment, I decided that one avenue of research should be into Central American instruments and music. What I found was three noticeable themes to this culture’s sound; Use of wind instruments such as whistles and flutes, steady percussive rhythm from pelt drums, and the presence of rattles. 

(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tl7DCbClOE)

In addition, as I will be composing for a game, I decided to also look into some of the games that inspired the group back during this project’s conception. Inevitably, this meant turning to Crash Bandicoot trilogy and the Boulder Escape levels. These audio tracks were fast paced with a heavy focus of percussion instruments, spliced with a full range of instruments from different families to create a much more unique and quirky sound.

(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFZ1bww2Ou4)

The two musical styles complement each other in the aspect of percussion variety, but differ considerably in regards to range of instruments used and pacing. Moving forward, the challenge with composing and selecting appropriate audio will be to create something that complements both of these musical themes while still being appropriate in mood and tone for an infinite runner game.

As Lead Audio for this vertical slice, part of my responsibilities include sourcing / generating audio for the vertical slice and handling it’s implementation. This post will discuss how audio has been implemented over the course of this project thus far and it’s culmination into the Audio Manager and Library classes.

During implementation of the menu system, the Project Lead included a functional prototype of would become the Audio Manager. This was a GameObject that contained a number of named child objects, each with it’s own Audio Source component attached. On interaction with the menu, the relevant game object would be called by the MenuManager and MainMenuManager classes. and the component called and played. This allowed us to quickly implement audio into our project from an early point in development.

While functional, this system involved a lot of mostly empty game objects and audio sources that mostly remained in scene not doing an awful lot. Instead, I looked to designing and implementing a better system.

The Audio Manager class is that system. It holds two Audio Source components, one designated for handling Background Music (BGMSource) and one for handling Sound Effects (SFXSource). It also contains a number of utility methods, such as lerping volume to a specified amount over a specified periood of time and determining on scene load whether an audio track needs to be replaced or continued. By default, the two audio sources do not contain audio clips.

The Audio Library works in conjunction with the Audio Manager, and provides an easy way to pass in the necessary audio clips to it’s sources, thus reducing the need for multiple audio sources in-scene. The most important components of the Audio Library are it’s Dictionary of Strings to Audio Clips and a public AudioClip method. The method takes in a string as a parameter and returns the Audio Clip in the Dictionary if it contains it, meaning the Audio Manager can easily look up a specified Audio Clip and add it to either of it’s Audio Sources as appropriate dynamically.