.png){kind=logo}
Hello to all you loyal Junkfish followers out there. My name is Gary, commonly known around these parts as “The Goat”. Don’t ask why because it would take up more space than this humble little blog post.
Today I am here to tell you what my blood, sweat and tears have been going into these past few weeks here at Junkfish: the abomination that is not going to give you an easy time while you are aboard the vessel in our up coming game “Project Maize”.
But before I get to that, let me talk about the sound of the ship. Working closely with our resident sound man Jaime, every step has been taken to create a daunting atmosphere; from the eerie sounds in the ambiance of the environment to the all out raw aggression from the beast himself. One of our pride and joys here in the audio side of things is the usage of audio occlusion methods. This is used to make the sounds alter as the player moves around the ship by being filtered down by walls and other objects in the way. Using low pass filters and basic ray casting we were able to alter the sound produced by the source in real time. The effect increases with the number of walls between you and the sound emitter. However as you move back into a clear path the sound will become clear once more. Here is an example of the audio occlusion in action through the use of our state of the art TVs. (Excuse the video quality.)
Here you can hear the TV’s noise changing as I duck and dive between the corridors. Notice how the noise gets quieter and filtered down as the wall is between the player and the set. As the player moves further from the TV the static noise gets quieter until it is inaudible.
The next stage which we want to achieve for this effect is to have it come in smoothly around corners and walls emulating how real world 3D sound works in these situations. We’re also looking into improving the directionality of the game’s sound to make it easier for the player to locate certain things. The player roughly knows what direction the sound comes from as we’re using a standard sphere emitter, while we’re wanting it to travel down through the hallways and rooms towards the player like it would in a real place.
But what is that you can hear tearing up the place in the next room…?
He doesn’t know who you are. He doesn’t know what you want. But he will look for you, he will find you and he will kill you! Nothing is going to stand in his way. Not even the most reliable protection known to mankind: Doors.
So I am sorry guys, but you’re just going to have to find another way to stop him. If you do manage to get away from him chasing you don’t assume you are out of the woods just yet. Because not only can he see you running about, he can hear you and he can also smell you! He will use all of these senses to search for you until he finds you again. If you make a noise he is coming to check it out and destroy whatever made it. That may be you! Are you going to be able to evade this creature tearing the place apart not be his next kill? But what are you running from I hear you ask? How is he going to kill you? What is he going to look like?