Project Rage DevBlog #5

Here is the breakdown of my work on Project Rage from 4/03/2022 to 4/17/2022.

Creating Heavy Enemy Charge and Dash (3 hours)

The first thing I done in these two weeks was work on the Heavy Enemy Charge and Dash. The heavy enemy has an attack pattern of charging up, blinking yellow while it does so, and then charging at the player dealing damage and knocking them down. For the charge up, I thought that a sound involving an machining winding up would sound great so I created that within ableton using various synths (1 hour). Another part that I thought would be very great to include is a bouncing sweep which got faster and faster for the windup (30 minutes). I pieced them together and added various audio effects for them to blend seamlessly. Then I had to include the dash portion which I didn’t know what I should include. So I listened to various dash sound effects from a lot of different games such as from sonic 3 and from pokemon. I realized that dash should sound more energetic in the beginning and less so in the end. I had to then figure out what a machine dashing on concrete might sound like. I knew it was going to have to be very gritty, and as I experiemnted I realized that high hats combined with noise then slowed down to a large degree will get the sound that I like. The dash took me around 1 hour 30 minutes. Here is the final Heavy Enemy Charge and Dash Sfx.

Reiterating Elevator Sound Effects (2 hours)

After getting feedback from design that the elevator sounds were a bit too reverberant I decided to redo the elevator sounds from the ground up. The audio lead, Morgan, told me that I should aim for something more mechanical and futuristic. I set out to try to do so. At first I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. But I assumed he meant that the sound of the elevators opening and closing should sound like motors like this or this but maybe longer. So I set out with a synth to create that sort of sound. I combined multiple sine wave synths and put a lot of audio effects on them and eventually after quite a long time I was able to get a sound that I wanted. I added some more things like elevator bells and elevator’s shutting sound to make it a bit more realistic. This whole process took around 2 hours. Here is the final Elevator Opening and Elevator Closing sound effects.

Reiterating Results-Victory Screen Music (3 hours)

Morgan also told me the guitar wasn’t rendering properly and I had to redo the guitar parts almost completely which took around 1 hour 30 minutes. When I was trying to get the rendered stems to Morgan, I realized that the sound for this piece was a bit boring and too repetitive. Thus, I changed up a lot of the audio and created some more interesting melodies in the guitar portion. I added another guitar to provide some more interesting background sounds and changed up some of the rhythmns in the drums. This process took around another 1 hour 30 minutes. At the end I renedered it as stems and sent it to Morgan and he told me that it was great. Here is the final results victory screen music

Floating Sign Ambience (2 hours)

I also was assigned to work on the Floating Sign Ambience this past week. When I think of anything floating, I think of electrical hum such as this or this. So I created a sort of electrical hum that fits what I believed to be both futuristic and more clear than the sound effects that I listened to for reference this took around 1 hour to perfect the synth and add enough audio effects so that it fits what I wanted. When I think of cyberpunk, I think of distopia and decay, so I added some electrical buzz to the sound of sign such that it seems like there is periodic electrical faults (1 hour). I think this really fit well with the cyberpunk theme. Here is the final floating sign ambience sound.

WolverineSoft Studio Meetings (4 hours)

I attended the studio meetings every sunday from 11 to 1 for the past two weeks where the audio team discussed current work and ways to improve our work. This was the last week we had meetings so we just talked about how the semester went. I thought that this semester was pretty sucessful!

Time Breakdown

This two weeks I spent a total of 14 hours working on the project. I took 3 hours to create the heavy enemy charge and dash. I took 2 hours to reiterate the elevator sound effects. I took 3 hours to fix the results victory screen and reiterate on it. I took 2 hours to create the floating sign ambience. I also spent 4 hours in wolverinesoft studio meetings.