Fracked

• Intense, constant, deadly.

• All enemies present a substantial threat and the audio treats them as such.

• Enemy footsteps repsond to the surface, direction and height feedback.

• Weapons and barks respond to the environmental reverb settings, solidifying them in the space.

• The amount of active enemies firing is tracked in Blueprint. When an enemy starts firing, a global parameter is increased, and decreased when they stop firing. With one enemy firing, each emitter uses a single shot sound. With multiple, it uses baked multi-shot sounds. This is to minimise the amount of Fmod events triggered and increase performance.

• This parameter is also used by the shot proximity fly-by, which is an emitter placed on the player. As the global parameter increased, the scatter instrument plays a bullet whizby at a random location. Though this is imprecise, it was a performant way to include whizby in the game.

• Larger blaster enemy weapon uses a different whizby implementation, with a component attached to the bullet effect mesh that flies through the world.

• Health feedback is vital, and as the player recieves damage a low-pass filter ramps across the health range to reinforce the health visuals.

Providing surface, speed and airbourne feedback to the player while they ski down the slope was the priority. This was accomplished with several emitters:

• Skis (players feet): This had all the surface audio detail, the snow surface loops - pitch adjusted by the speed of the player. Placing this below the player means a direction Fmod parameter can help to filter adjust the sound if the player looks at their skis.

• Midriff (players body): Emitter on the player, to add some fabric rustling - feedback increased based on ski speed.

• Left/Right Surround (away from player): This provides wind rushing feedback, again linked to speed. The stereo pair meant the wind can change based on the direction the player looks. - the ear facing against the direction of travel will have the biggest rush of air through it.

I also implemented a nearby object whoosh, which triggers whenever the player passes by an object. This is managed by a raycast off from the player, to give great feedback on the players speed. Raycast tracks object size, so whizzing past a long object will keep the whiz active until the object has passed, whereas a tree will be instantaneous.

Emitters are placed positionally in the world to provide appropriate audio for the visuals. The emitters double up as feedback for certain gameplay elements to expand their use as well as provide a more immersive soundscape.

• Explosions and ambience events are sent to a mixer, based on distance of the emitter to the player. The mixer is linked to a global gameplay parameter, which is then linked to the ambience emitters.

• The parameter is assigned to various positional ambient events - when an explosion triggers, the parameter is raised and the feedback plays.

• This recreates the effect high-pressure events have in the world, simulating environmental movement.