Sounds and more

The sound design course I took was superb. I learned all about layer different sounds together, a quick overview into what is good and bad practice. I even got a lesson in organizing the variables in my blueprints which was very useful because my player character is full of variables I took the time to organize that as well. Back to the sound. I learned about modulation which can randomize the pitch and volume of sound so it doesn’t always sound the same. There are mixers that you use to put sounds together, delay nodes too similar to blueprint, concatenator if you want to play things in order. It was all about creating ambient and other environmental sounds that were realistic, believable, and optimized. The best lesson was using the a limited amount of sounds and playing around with it so you can have different combinations that will always sound different. That way you don’t have to have hundreds of varied tracks to play, simply mix and match the ones you have.

As I went through the lesson I popped back and forth to my project to see which sounds could be improved using the best practices. A small delay in the door opening made a huge difference because it matched the sound that was playing. Tomorrow is a sound lesson that will have more to do with characters and animation so I might even learn a better way to act sounds to moving objects then. I also worked on fixing the issue with the inspected objects being able to stack on top of each other. Now the player cannot move while inspecting an object. That way they have to put it down in order to get to another object. The harder one to figure out was the grapple/swing. I couldn’t simplify it like I did the whip because they did very different actions. But thankfully I was able to use traces that didn’t go through walls and now you have to be able to see the hook point to use it. I’ll definitely adjust it down the road because it’s not so easy to aim with the controller.