Jumping onto the sound team this term there was a lot of work that had already gone into the designing the audio environment. With a few soundscapes and a lot of individual audio files, there was a lot to work off of. I’ve also gotten to work in tandem with the Narrative and UI teams a lot, jumping around to a few different jobs besides audio.

I started by focusing on finding some good UI sounds, such as page turns quill scribbles, to add to the journal that was being created by Caitlin. The internet is full of interesting sounds under creative commons, and the goal for me was to find sounds that fit the visual style of journal that were also the right length (or could be edited to the right length) for the actions happening within the UI.

I also started familiarizing myself with Twine at the beginning of the term. Twine lets you build branching conversations – the most extensive ones look like this:

Mine was much simpler, with only five or six phrases. But its a start! And it was a really fun software and writing process to continue learning.

The next goal is to record the dialogue from these Twines. We already had one conversation recorded, which I then split into individual question and answer files so they would be easier to implement into the game itself. And tomorrow we’re recording John Wilme’s dialogue – another longer conversation that looks like the one posted above. We’re using the audio studio to get the cleanest sound. I like to both record and edit in Adobe Audition, which looks a bit like this:

I’m also starting to fiddle around in Unity to start working with geographic based implementation of sounds. Certain landmark sounds of the city would only be able to be heard within certain radiuses, and by layering these sounds with soundscapes and street sounds it should work to create a very dynamic sonic environment for the player.