Hello! My name is Nicole Watlington, currently getting my Bachelor of Science in Recording Arts at Full Sail University. What you’re about to read is my postmortem for the two projects that I worked on this month: The UE4 Platformer and The Wwise Limbo project. A postmortem is a reflection of what went right and wrong during production; primarily why those things happened and how can there be improvement in the future or simply just congratulations on the great work. A postmortem is supposed to have a team feedback too. The purpose of this postmortem is to utilize what I learned from my mistakes and success, the overall experience, as reference for future projects.

 

The UE4 Platformer

I worked in Unreal Engine 4 for the Platformer game. Before I started to work on it, I sat down to think about what kind of aesthetic I wanted for the game. It was a little bit difficult for me since this was the first game I’ve ever worked on. I found myself thinking about game aesthetics for the first time ever, but it made my journey so much easier in terms of sound design and music. I didn’t want it to sound futuristic, I wanted it to sound as a robot built in the present day, and I wanted it to have a lot of details; I wanted it to sound realistic.

After days of working with Platformer, I was unable to achieve my main goal: detail. I had a hard time designing the robot’s footsteps and I just couldn’t get the right sound. They didn’t sound as strong and as powerful as I wanted them to, and because time was of the essence I had to go with the footsteps that I recorded originally and didn’t like. If I’d had more time I would’ve put more effort into those robot footsteps. For other future projects I can focus on recording better sounds and layering them, something I failed to do with said assets. Regarding the Implementation and the mix balance, I’d say it was okay but not great. Mixing was hard for me because my file levels were too over top, so there was no consistency. The correct thing to do was to check the peak levels before importing them to the engine, but I didn’t. I spent a lot of time working with the ambience’s audio radius and fades to find the perfect balance between the “Ground” ambience and the “Distant” ambience, so that the change of the robot running to where he’s jumping wasn’t abrupt. I was able to successfully achieve smoothness after a lot of work. The ambiences mixed well with everything else except for once small detail, the foley for the tire sparks loop. The sound was annoying and I decided not to use it. It didn’t fit at all and it was a shame. I tried to bring it down in the mix but it was still a sound that I wouldn’t want the people playing the game to hear. One of my biggest concerns when working on sound design for this game was the timing. I asked myself all sorts of questions like: How long should this be? Would this fit? What if the asset is shorter than the animation? I didn’t have the game with me to play it when I was working on the assets thus creating stress in me. Also, I’ve never worked with non-linear audio until my involvement with this project so I learned something new. The timing of the animation with the sounds ended up being excellent. It ended up not being a problem at all given the fact, like I mentioned above, that I couldn’t play the game at the exact moment that I was working with the sounds.

Not everything went bad in the game! I’m really proud of the cinematic. The sounds went well with the visuals even though it was simple. By simple I mean that there wasn’t much going on, but it was still entertaining; it didn’t need much. They fit perfectly with the ambience too. I’d say it was my forte in this project. It was a different experience to work with the sounds of such game. Learning my ways around the Unreal Engine 4 wasn’t an issue and the project itself wasn’t really a challenge which means that I was able to complete it in time.

In conclusion, the schedule and quality expectations were realistic, but I wish I would’ve used the time I had more wisely even though I did my best. I was able to finish, but I’m not entirely proud of it. There are many many things I wish I could go back and change, but this is where I reflect and learn about what went right and what went wrong. Now that I’ve worked on this game and have a better understanding of the engine and I can make sure I don’t commit the same mistakes in other projects, and nevertheless applause the strong suits too.

 

Wwise Limbo Project

For Limbo we worked in Wwise, and we used The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a game reference for the aesthetic because we found its sound design to be very complex and interesting to study. We went for “Mysterious nordic European countryside”. As far as deciding what kind of aesthetic we wanted to have and designing, it was easy for us because the sounds that we were basing our sounds off are relatively realistic sounds; nothing too complicated. We didn’t hesitate when trying to visualize how the game was to sound because the game was already done in our minds. To us, the thing that stood out the most was the ambience. You can hear the strong winds from the nordic mountains and various sounds that you would hear in forests. My personal favorite is when the character dies with the wooden spikes because it sounds like a sword slashing the body.

When it was time to implement the sounds we had a hard time with Wwise because we found it hard and complicated, which made us lose a lot of time. We should’ve read about said engine beforehand, that way we wouldn’t have been completely clueless about it so that it would’ve been a more productive environment, being at least a little familiar with it. We had many troubles like for example: one of our loops kept playing even though it was to stop at one point, and our ambience not playing during the entire game even though it was supposed to. It felt like every time we would fix a problem a new one would come up and was very stressful. We soon found that time was against us and we still had a lot to do but we started to work more like a team and started getting back on track. If something went wrong in this project, then it was the amount of time we had to work on it. Apart from that issue, everything else went great. The mix sounded smooth and the animation timing was perfect also.

All of our assets sound different because we wanted to create immersion. Repetition was not in our checklist. I’m really proud of what we accomplished in such short time and that we were able to complete the project by the deadline. I feel like we should’ve had more time. Eight hours seemed a little unrealistic to us, especially since we had high expectations for this game. It can be rewarding to have more time to work next time to create perfection. Working on a team was okay but it was difficult at the same time. Although we were following a certain style or aesthetic, we have different ears and different ideas which means that our assets might’ve sounded different when put together. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case. Our assets worked very well together and there weren’t any big differences sound-wise. The file levels were double checked, which means that we categorized the ambiences and foley so the assets and normalized them to have their peaks at -3dbFS. It was also easier because there were two heads thinking so ideas were flowing really quick. We both had different mindsets and whenever we needed help, we were there to help each other with the knowledge we had. In our case, there weren’t really any downs apart from the preoccupation of our sound assets sounding like they came from different games or not sounding like they belong side to side. We both listened to what each one had to say, were open to ideas, and were flexible in terms of collaboration; working with a team on this project was a big plus and I couldn’t have done it without my partner because the game portrays rich results of our hard work.

In conclusion, it was a very different experience from what I’m used to. This project was definitely a team sport due to all of the sounds we had to design and the short amount of time we had to so. We we’re lucky that we didn’t have any problems when designing the sounds and mixing; it ended up sounding like we wanted putting aside the all the technical problems and brick walls that were put in front us when implementing the sounds and correcting the time issues. I’m very proud of this project and I hope I can take all the positive outcomes of this game to learn and use them as future reference.