I worked on Alan Wake 2 at Remedy between February 2020 and August 2021. I didn’t actually do much on the project itself. At the time, my focus was on:
- Teaching the audio team how to use Lua with Northlight (the in-house game engine and toolset)
- Designing and implementing in-game debug UI for the music and promoting to the rest of the audio team debug UI widgets as a great tool for interactive audio (for testing, debugging, etc.)
- Organizing and writing our internal documentation
- Python scripting for automating some of the repetitive Wwise work
- Reviewing the interactive design and implementation work my team mates would do
- Recruitment
One thing I can show is how I made a prototype in Unity in the summer of 2020 to imagine how we could improve our audio-driven content and our workflow compared to what we had in Quantum Break:
The focus of the study was to improve the synchronization between the audio and the visuals while significantly simplifying the workflow for the visual artists.
The usual workflow for setting up audio-driven visuals (lighting, VFX, etc.) implies that the visual artist first finds the dynamic range of the audio signal they intend to drive their content with. It can represent a significant amount of work if there is a lot of audio-driven visual content. Moreover, every time an audio person makes a change to the audio content that changes the amplitude of the signal, the visual artist has to redo the process of finding the dynamic range of the audio content. It’s tedious and it often impacts the end result, as no one has the patience to maintain all this work.
This is precisely what this prototype aims to improve. It automates the tracking of the dynamic range of the audio content. The only thing the user can optionally define is how reactive the tracking must be, meaning how big the time window is for tracking how loud and how quiet the audio content can be.
For the purpose of the prototype, I made the procedural content myself. The sound was made with Wwise SoundSeed Wind and the steam with the particle system in Unity.