Demetris Demetriou

Concept

I was inspired by Kenshi's audio system and wanted to attempt something similar for my Procedural Assets elective. My approach was to come up with a sonic theme for each area that would be in this conceptual game; I decided to go for a dystopian, sci-fi open-world exploration game as my base, and then went on with creating soundscapes in Ableton Live for each of these regions.

Technical Details

• Tools: Unity, Wwise, Ableton Live

I started by assembling a variety of different music loops, featuring different instrumentation per in-game zone, visualized by the map. These loops are split up into different buckets that I referred to as layers, which are then split up into sub-buckets for the purposes of having different music for day and night. In the current version, there are 6 loops per layer of each region; 3 for day, 3 for night. The system grabs loops randomly based on the time of day and will procedurally generate a track from them. Parameters like the probability of a bucket being used, and the delay min/max determines when the loops are introduced when music plays. This makes it so that the music can vary greatly, from feeling very full if 3 loops are pulled, to feeling very sparse when only one, or only two, are pulled. The delay min/max adds to this even further by being able to vary when a loop will play, bringing in a high level of variability.

On top of this, there's also a weather bucket that can diegetically fade in when a weather condition kicks in, with different loops it can choose from, adding variance to the sound of each weather condition.