The game operates within a Medival Village scene featuring three distinct areas for the player to explore: the church, the village, and open spaces. Each area has its own unique ambiance and soundscape.

The entire game scene is enclosed within the AkSpatialAudioVolume Environment, which provides a quiet overall ambiance featuring soft wind. The blue region in the above picture is its child room called Bug Zone with cicada sounds throughout. This ambiance is looped within a cuboid spatial volume. The sound is set to 2D and converted from stereo to mono to avoid directional cues. If the sound were kept in stereo, bug sounds in one ear would remain fixed even as the player turns, making the environment feel less realistic. 

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The floor and ceiling of Bug Zone are blocked, while the sides allow its parent ambiance to permeate through.

The sound listener, as the name suggests, is where sound is received rather than emitted. By default, Unreal Engine attaches the sound listener to the camera. However, there is some debate about whether the listener should be attached to the player or the camera, as both setups work for different situations. In this simple third-person setup, the sound listener is attached to the player with camera rotation to avoid issues with sounds abruptly shifting or turning as the camera moves while still being able to hear what the player hears at their location.

Inside the village, it’s important to make a distinction between spaces outside the environment and the spaces in the interior. The two main ways of doing that are to change the reverberance rate and sound occlusion. The best way of altering these properties is using auxiliary buses in Wwise with a different convolution or plate reverb. This allows different layers of reverb according to its location. In this project, there are reverb buses for small, medium, and large room, forests, lakeside.

To create a dynamic soundscape in the village, it is essential to introduce randomness, mimicking the way sounds occur in real life. Several sporadic sounds are designed in the scene, including insect calls, changing bell sounds from the church that chimes every 10 minutes, and bird calls on the trees. Sound occlusion is turned off for these ambient sounds to ensure they propagate naturally throughout the scene.

The wild geese are niagra vfx that flies in circles, so their sound path is set to revolve around the player. So while under the group of birds, their calls would travel from the right ear to the right in stereo.

To get the information about the surface material, the character shoots a ray beneath it, and the ray that first contacts the material reports back and consequently changes the material type for Wwise to alter sounds. 

Each sound sample is sourced from sound libraries and modified to fit the scene. For instance, since the grass in the scene appears shallow and soft, a high-pass filter is applied to the grass footstep sound, allowing only high frequencies to pass through and creating a subtle, sizzling effect. To prevent other sounds from becoming repetitive, pitch and volume variations are added to introduce randomness and make them feel more natural.

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The picture below shows the 2 kinds of line traces needed for detecting foliage and other materials. 

The jump animation lands with feet happening at separate times, so 2 anim notifies are created, with the first one a footstep sound, and the second one a harder stomp with an additional metal rustling layer.