Hello world! My name is Martin Hoffman, lead game designer for Carleton’s Boston Massacre project. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about myself later, but for now I’m jumping right into some of the nitty-gritty of development so far.

While sound doesn’t fall directly under my umbrella, part of my responsibility is implementing samples from the audio team in the game engine (we’re using Unity). One of the first hurdles I ran into was implementing the ambiance of a tavern into a sample scene.

Unity has some great functionality for adding sounds to a scene. The default sound source game object is well suited to sound that comes from point or a small area. With these noises, Unity can apply any of a number of interesting effects including Doppler, roll-off (changing volume based on the player’s distance to the source), and reverb (changing sounds based on the environment).

However, ambient noise does not function like a lot of other sounds. Your ears don’t expect the general hubbub of a room to come from a single point like they would a gunshot or a voice. Ideally, we would just sample dozens of different sounds to place individually in the scene. With only nine of us on the team though, we just don’t have the resources to do that. That put me in an interesting position: trying to create a soundscape with only one (very well mixed, go sound team!) track.

I tried a lot of things… messing with the spatial blend, adding colliders and scripts to change the sound, adding multiple sources for the same sound, none of it felt good. So, I got creative, popped open everyone’s favorite mixing software. I took the sound I had and created three distinct tracks by offsetting where the loop started. Having three sound sources playing slightly different audio let me fill the room with immersive noise that felt ambient.