Duc-ee’s
Programs: Unity, FMOD, Ableton
Roles: Sound Design/Implementation, Music
Inspired by the game mechanics of frisbee golf, my team and I created “Duc-ee’s,” a VR game where you play as a Duc-ee’s employee and serve impatient customers their food by throwing each plate frisbee-style. I was responsible for the preliminary concepts, game design, sound design, and music. This project uses FMOD to dynamically change music relative to customer anger.
LlamaGo
GGJ24 Judge’s Choice Award
Programs: Unity, FMOD, Ableton Live, Reaper,
Roles: Sound Design/Implementation, Game Design, VA
My team of six others and I tackled the “Make Me Laugh” Global Game Jam 2024 theme by making a fun golf game with silly physics and lots of spitting llamas! During the 48-hour jam, I recorded several foley sounds in an isolated studio environment to make our game sound unique. Some major examples include golf ball taps for each hit, gloopy water bottle swishes for the llama spit ability, and close-miked hand balm for the liquidy tail end that illustrates the spit ability colliding with another player. I even voiced our llama!
Immersive Environments in VR: Research Project
Roles: Project Manager, Sound Design/Implementation
Programs used: Unity, FMOD, Ableton
In December 2023, I led a team of 5 people to research how binaural audio, sound directivity, object occlusion, and size and material-based reflections impact a player’s presence and immersion in a virtual environment. During this project, my team and I conducted a variable-controlled test to determine the effect of binaural audio, sound directivity, and a changing visual environment on each subject’s perception of the sound source and their confidence in each answer. Using Google's Resonance Audio SDK, we made a final environment that implemented binaural audio, directivity, occlusion, and size and material-based reflections.
Implementation
Ambient River Zone
Rather than dispersing multiple instances of an ambient river sound across the water, I developed a script that dynamically positions a single emitter at the player's nearest location within a designated area. This ensures a consistent volume level for the ambient river sound as the player moves along the river. To accomplish this, I used a 2D mesh collider and the Collider.ClosestPoint function.
Dynamic Footsteps
To enhance immersion, I developed a script that dynamically selects footstep sounds in FMOD based on the surface material the player interacts with—water, wood, stone, grass, and marble. Upon collision, a switch function is called in Unity, sending the material’s unique tag to play the corresponding sound in FMOD.
Occlusion
I used Resonance Audio's occlusion feature in Unity, integrating it with FMOD to dynamically adjust audio based on object occlusion. I adopted code from Alessandro Famà to cast a ray from the player to detect occluded objects on the “Walls” layer. Upon collision, Resonance Audio's occlusion knob in FMOD is adjusted, filtering higher frequencies and attenuating volume accordingly.
Resonance Audio Reverb Zone
One unique feature of Resonance Audio is its reverb zone system, which calculates early reflections and late reverberation based on room dimensions and materials. In the showcased church demo I configured all materials as wooden, except for the marble floor.