Audio in Ace of Saturn

As we were going toward two strong feelings "over-the-top" and "quirky", we had to find a way to get it onto our audio scope too. So we chose to make a nice piece of work around voice acting and integrating dialogues that would reflect the spirit of the game, help characterize all the sidekicks and the main protagonist and antagonist, through gameplay-oriented barks and dialogue phases that set up all of them. 

Emma-Louise, game designer on the project, managed the casting, the content, and the artistic direction. I recorded the voicelines, did the audio editing, mixed and integrated them. I used Wwise for the integration, Reaper for the sound design/record/mix, Google Sheets to communicate with actors and give them the lines (written and organized by Emma-Louise), we used Figma to get a prototype of "voice interactions and choices made by the player".

• My first approach of a "voice pipeline" work

• Batch editing

• Character design by audio

• Special shots cues to give a maximum personalization for each character

I had the opportunity to work on the music composition too ! With "stars & shines" aesthetic, I wanted to give it a side of a magical confrontation between two giants in space, waiting for an outcome. I didn't have the time to integrate it as a vertical sequence, so I didn't use the full potential of the interactive music hierarchy in Wwise. It could be something I would rework on later, since I exported all the separated stems to make it possible in the future.

• Creative music composition

And, one of our source of pride, we worked on process to make our game accessible through audio settings too. We couldn't resign ourselves to put it aside and not thinking it, because as a team, we wanted to integrate since the beginning acessibility as a whole. It was a lot of work, it's not perfect, but for a student game, we're kind of proud of what we could do in a three-months period (where we also had classes). Jessica had put a lot of efforts to make it happens, gave us multiple ways and workarounds to integrate it in game engine, in conception, in our art direction. So, for the audio, we made some documents about accessibility settings, we made some coordinated researchs, and I found some ways at my level to get some features 

• Mono, Stereo, and Headphones mixes

• Audio ping that is called everytime the player is near the ball (visual art team were doing the same : everytime it's near the player, a circle around Saturn highlights itself in bright color)

• An advanced audio menu settings to tweak every possible sound that can be heard through the game

• Audio design iteration to make it as affordant as possible (playtests, getting feedbacks)

• External Unity plugin to have a Text-To-Speech voicing the menu, enabled by default (thanks to Nino !)

A big thanks to the team : 

(GD) Emma-Louise BOT, (ART) Anaïs DUBART, Morgane RAYMOND, (PROG) Nino SANDLARZ, (UX/UR) Jessica TESO