Synapse

The weapons in Synapse were equally as important to the player experience. There was only a handful of firearms so making each feel distinct and meaningful was vital. Each gun used several emitters attached to the the mesh to simulate a surround effect when fired, and also provide a subtle change in timbre as the weapon was fired from whatever position the player fired from. The amount of ammo was tracked, and applied over a filter ramp to give an indication of how much ammo remained before a reload was required. Each weapon could be upgraded too, so additional feedback layers were applied for each upgrade to make the gun sound bigger to match the progression. 

As with all my projects I always want the player to feel as immersed as possible, and movement feedback is often a good way to sell that. I expanded upon the feedback from Fracked by utilising the movement speed of each controller, and fed that into a volume curve in Wwise that ramped up when the speed increased. A switch was used when a player was holding a gun in that hand, so a mix of fabric and metallic shaking can be used instead.

The level ambience was achieved by using spot emitters assosciated with specific visual elements. Each level had at least one focal point that I could base the ambience around, waterfalls, beaches, ruins, as well as some interior spaces. There was enough performance overhead on the PS5 to use Wwise convolution reverb, which enhanced the quality of those interiors. The level streaming structure meant that the controllers had to be assigned at runtime, but the rest of the ambience implementation was kept as simple as possible.