Crafting Narrative Experiences

This blog post is an insight to the thought process and the production methods used during the development of my last project for SAE. For this project I had chosen to represent how sound could be a gameplay tool in an interactive gaming experience with the use of Unity with Fmod integrations. In the following chapter we shall look closely at how I achieved my goals through processing in Fmod. 

A realistic gaming experience:

One of the key aspects to my recent production is what I have labeled the “narrative experiences' in these parts of the game the player is immersed in total darkness and relies entirely on sound, be it through the soundscape or through dialogue to recreate and imagine the scene in front of them. The chosen aesthetics of the game meant that I had to recreate a realistic impression of the players surroundings and this is how I went about it using the scene in the church which features the most elements of sound as an example.

Creation of a generative energy trail 

The energy trail is a key mechanic to the game and is an element which appears constantly in the soundscape. For this sound not to bore the player I created a generative music player through Fmod using multi instruments, scatterers and probability to create a continuous signal to follow which would never be the same.

Fmod Integration in Unity

Radio communications simulation processing

The player is in constant dialogue with the space station during the entirety of the game. After the initial implementation of this audio with merely a dry signal, it became apparent that I would need to manipulate the sound to give the idea that I was conversing with someone over a radio, as opposed to hearing a godlike voice emerge from the soundscape. To create this effect, I combined filtering, distortion, and compression. See below. This process was also applied to any other sound source which was radio transmitted. Such as the radio in the sci fi sc ene and the leitmotif which appears on different radios as the player proceeds through the game.