Joel Paulin Hugo

Sound occlusion

If sound is blocked by walls, checked by a raycast, an FMOD parameter is set that controls a low pass filter and reverb to create a muffled sound. The parameter value is set by the lenght of the navmesh pathfinding from the player to the audio source. If no path is found, the value is automatically set to max.

Audio sources and triggers

Values can be set on Unreal Engine blueprints called audio sources and audio source triggers which is then imported to our engine. You can control which sound is played, if it should loop, play on entering or exiting the trigger, play once etc. This allows the level designers to design an interactive soundscape in their levels with audio triggering in specific parts of the level to create jumpscares and set atmosphere with creepy spatial SFX.

State stack

In our previous project, we had a scene manager that managed the levels and main menu of our game. This worked for most of the project but in the end it got very convoluted to implement pause states and cutscenes, and they often overlapped each other in unintended ways and didn’t reset correctly. I therefore sat the beginning of the project with refactoring and changing around the scene manager to use a state stack so only one game state would update at a time.

Moving obstacles

Our level designers asked us to contruct a modular system for our traps and moving obstacles to give them as much freedom as possible designing levels. From that request I came up with a system that used moving obstacle-components and trap-components. Each of these could be attached independently on a gameobject and give the object either or both of the functionality. Through unreal engine, our level editor, me and a colleague made a script that allowed the level designers to set the moving obstacles settings, and attach any number of traps as childs to the moving obstacle and thus move with it.

Audio implementation

This project, all music and ambience existed in a single FMOD event. That gave me good control over fading music in and out and made sure several music tracks didn’t play simultaneously.

I also made a system with sound components which controlled the position and playback of each gameobject individually.

An in world speaker was also implemented which played its own music tracks spatially in the world. By the use of FMOD parameters the speaker also fades down the main music theme when you get close to it.

Important objective pickup sounds were made with snippets from the main music theme to get a common thread through the whole game and bring familiarity to the player.