SoulSync City - Sound Designer

SoulSync City is a game that was developed on a large scale as a Senior year project, with everyone being placed into specialized roles. I took on the role of Lead Sound Designer, developing most of the sounds in the game, as there was no one else on sound design, aside from a Composer, with minor involvement as a Level Designer and Game (Systems) Designer. All sounds were typically made of smaller sounds, attempting to cohesively and accurately represent actions with multiple smaller actions.

SoulSync City was a game designed in a group format across 6 months, with around 30 people working on the project. With work being divided up amongst everyone, and everyone working where they preferred, I filled in for the role of (Lead) Sound Designer due to no other sound designers being present. I felt fine slipping into this position, being a generalist, but it became fairly apparent to me that working with 3D sound was something I needed a bit more practice with. However, I was able to wear a few hats, as I also had involvement in the game's design, providing input and feedback to the teams designing enemy behavior and tools, as well as being involved in the level design of Regicide (Level 2).

I used multiple other sounds and/or filtering and mastering effects in the process of creating sounds for the game. In the process of creating sounds for the game, it eventually became apparent that there were a few common guidelines and practices I needed to look up, as balancing has been the game's issue that was constantly being refined, but always just a little too far in one direction. However, it would appear that I'm at least decent at using the same sound effects for 2D media, as the cutscenes were the area with the fewest issues.

This project has helped me to get my bearings a bit more when it comes to future projects, especially when it comes to figuring out the middle ground between using audio sources (particularly their roll-off curves) and the volume of the sound clip. I plan to be taking a look at these skills in future solo and group projects moving forward to try to "iron out the kinks".

As for the game design, I had some involvement in helping to lay out the groundwork of the tools and mechanics, as I already had experience working with these systems in my high mobility shooter prototype, particularly helping to keep them controlled in overall speed and direction. However, since I wasn't on the functional teams for either tools or enemies, I was unable to fully push for many of the changes. Most of my involvement in those areas had been through "breaking the tools" using knowledge from other games' mechanics to do so, or pushing them to add ways they could be combined through how they function on a scripting level. I had been pushing my team to play into the mechanics, but it always seemed like my team seemed to think the higher-effort combos were problematic, restricting some potential movement styles.