Technical Sound Designer

December 2018 - July 2019

Snowfall Village is an RPG with a twist: rather than exploring a world with a group, you play the role of a leader frantically trying to stop a band of minimally-intelligent nomads from self-inflicted injury… or worse. One of my favorite sound design moments for the game occurred when recording footstep audio and the sounds of a shattering, frozen obelisk. I kept a leather jacket soaked in water in the bottom of my freezer for a few weeks and after it was thoroughly frozen, I recorded the audio of breaking it apart. Here are some of the clips from that recording session!

Building a modular dialogue engine in FMOD Studio for Snowfall Village

All dialog for the villagers in Snowfall Village was prototyped using vocal formant synthesis in VCV Rack and Arturia’s Minimoog emulator. I then exported the synthesized phonetics into FMOD to test my idea for the engine. One major goal with the dialog engine was to minimize the amount of programming needed to integrate it with the game and the writers’ script-integration tool (which relies heavily on json files for mood, character, animation cues, etc.). The final engine only requires two input parameters: the character and their respective mood. After prototyping, a few of the team members replicated those phonetics sounds in the necessary moods (and in the case of a character named Whistle, I had a level designer quite literally whistling in the vocal booth). This demo clip shows the final processed and integrated audio in the game.