Now that the dust has settled a bit, I decided I'd write a blog post to discuss a series audio implementation challenges I faced while creating "QA The Game" (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/qa-the-game). The game is made in Unity, with FMOD handling all of the audio.

Briefly, the idea for the game is that the player is put in the shoes of a QA tester, and has to identify and tag any bugs they encounter in this first person "walking-sim-esque" experience set in an office building. Minor spoilers for one of those bugs coming up.

Diegetic audio

I decided very early on that there should be no non-diegetic sounds in the game (besides a couple of small UI things, but I suppose those are still diegetic for the QA tester). My reasoning was that I wanted to sneak in plenty of audio "bugs" that need reporting, and that having blanket music playing throughout the level might distract from them. I also figured that a realistic office environment didn't really need a score per-se. This meant NO BACKGROUND MUSIC without an in game justification. But I still wanted to find a way to compose and sneak in some music, so I thought of a couple of options to have in world music playing.

I settled on two sources: a radio somewhere in the level, and the elevator which will be the focus of the rest of this blog.

Music as a bug

I set about composing a simple bossa-nova loop for the elevator (the cheesier the better!). When it was done, I made a "broken" version to serve as a bug that needs fixing. For this I used a tape player emulator, constantly increasing and decreasing the playback speed to make it sound like it's playing on a broken warped tape deck, with added noise for flavor. The "broken" version plays from the start, and switches seamlessly to the "correct" version once the player has found it and reported the bug.

Occlusion troubles

It would have been easiest to have the elevator doors stuck open, and the music playing in the ceiling, but we wanted a fully functioning elevator, with doors that open and close. I didn't particularly want to deal with making a "proper" audio occlusion system for a jam game (ray tracing etc...), but I also couldn't completely ignore the fact that the elevator music would lose all its credibility as a diegetic sound if it didn't change when the doors open and close. So I cheated with an FMOD snapshot that lowers volume slightly and applies a lowpass filter to muffle the sound. This actually worked very well! I just had to trigger the effect when the doors are closed, and release it when they're open. Or so I thought...

An elevator that goes nowhere is no fun!

At this point, I didn't realise that my programmer/level designer team-mate had already planned to push the elevator one step further and make it possible to ride it! So, as soon as I went to test my implementation, I discovered that I could open the doors, step in to the elevator, and the doors would close automatically behind me, triggering my muffled sound while the player is IN the elevator. So I went and reprogrammed my trigger behavior, made a simple trigger box inside the elevator so that the sound would not get muffled as long as the player stayed standing in the elevator. Problem fixed, occlusion system sorted. Or so I thought...

Sometimes, an elevator can hide another!

Once again, I didn't know what my team-mate had been building on his branch. I quickly found that even though the elevator was setup with a trigger box that should keep the FMOD muffling snapshot from firing, the music would get muffled as soon as it started moving. At this point, I got on voice chat with my team-mate and discovered there were in fact 3 elevators in the level: one at the top, one at the bottom, and one that animated during the ride. The player was just being teleported from one elevator to the other (the illusion is effective, because I had no idea, and I was MAKING this game!). So I copied my trigger box over into each cabin and solved my occlusion problem once and for all!

A last minute Easter egg at the end of the ride

You're starting to get the picture, my team-mate and I weren't exactly constantly telling each other everything we were building, so he had one final surprise left for me. He pushed his updated level design to git a bit under 2 hours before the end of the jam, and with it, the basement that waits at the end of the elevator ride. I had no idea it would be more than an empty room, but the nature of that basement meant I felt I HAD to make one final adjustment to my elevator music system. So in the final minutes of the jam, I composed a third "hidden" version of the music that plays only in the basement, and I'd be doing it a disservice if I described it here: I'm afraid you'll have to play the game, ride the elevator, and discover it for yourselves!

Thanks for reading!

I hope this is of interest to some. If anybody has any questions or remarks regarding FMOD or the system, please let me know in the comments! Check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/qa-the-game And I'd love to hear about other cool audio design and implementation work you fine folks did during this jam, so link me to your games and tell me about them!!