Wwise Interactive Sound Design Showcase

Overview

This post showcases my work in Wwise, a powerful audio middleware used in game development.

A huge thanks to my girlfriend Wei Wei, a professional game composer and sound designer. These projects wouldn’t be possible without her composition and artistic direction for the interactive sound design. All the music and most of the sound effects in this showcase are composed by her.

Projects

Echo of the Dust

Background Music

For background music, we have 2 states: “Battle” and “Boss”. The state change is triggered by the player entering a battle or boss fight. To make the transition between different states as seamless as possible, we changed the switch logic to use “next beat”, which makes the music transition as quickly as possible, but also ends on a beat. This way, the music will not abruptly stop or change. We also added a fade out to make it even more smooth and immersive.

“Boss” state also have 2 stages, stage 1 and stage 2. The default is stage 1. After the boss die for the first time, the boss will revive, enter the second stage, and trigger the stage 2 music. The transition logic is also next beat with fade out. We also added a sound effect to indicate the transition, which also make the transition more seamless.

Sound Effects Mixing

For sound effects, to make it “pop” in the game, we used ducking to lower the volume of the background music and environment sounds when a sound SFX is triggered. This way, the sound effects will be more prominent and clear to the player.

To achieve this, we used RTPC to dynamically adjust the volume of BGM and environment sounds based on the volume of the SFX. Since most sound effects are in the high frequency range, we used a low-pass filter to duck the high frequency range of the BGM and environment sounds, while keeping the low frequency range intact. This way, the sound effects will be more prominent without losing the overall soundscape.

Overall Mixing

For overall mixing, we used a bus to group all the sound effects and background music together. We applied a compressor and a peak limiter to the bus to ensure that the overall sound level is consistent and not too loud, while still maintaining the dynamic range of the sound effects and background music.

Stoneman’s Adventure

Please refer to the post below for more details on this project. Stoneman’s Adventure Wwise Showcase