airwiggles asteroids

This is a game developed in Unreal Engine 5 as part of the 2024 ImplemenTournament by Airwiggles.

For this competition, you were asked to create and implement all aspects of the audio in the game. I used FMOD Studio 2.3 as my middleware of choice.

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Sound design special features

Asteroid Scanner

Implemented a line trace based detection system to check for asteroids in the direct flight path of the ship. Returns the distance to a detected object and sets a distance parameter in FMOD to drive the scanner ping rate and VO announcements.

Sidechaining

Many sound aspects are influencing each other using sidechains. Asteroid explosions for example are lowering the overall volume off all ship sounds a little bit but a low passed return bus below 200Hz of those explosions lowering those volumes even more and in addition is affecting the high frequencies of the ships laser weapons. This creates a soft deafening effect for big and low end heavy explosions.

Delay Over Distance

Sound is not instant, it has a speed at which the soundwaves travel through the air in the real world. Although there is no air in space and realistically no sound either, I implemented a delay for very distant sounds to create a realistic effect. During testing I ended up with 1/4th of the actual physically correct delay to create the best gameplay experience. This delay is used on laser impacts and asteroid explosions.

Spatial Audio

Using atmoky True Spatial for this project enabled me to create a real sense of space between the listener and the sounds thanks to the externalization feature of the plugin. In addition, the spatialization makes all sounds appear in their real position due to acoustically correct binaural rendering for headphones.