Sound Designer/Foley Artist
Bearly Baking
Bearly Baking is a cooking and relationship-building game where you play as a bear running an inn to feed animals for hibernation. You cook bread and muffins in small mini-games, and based on the quality, you build better relationships with your patrons and learn more about their stories. I handled all the SFX and Foley design, as well as the Wwise backend for the dynamic music in the game!
Bearly Baking: Stirring Dough
"A Happy Forest"
One of the main challenges of this project was capturing the environment in the soundscape, it being rather unique. How would a forest village inhabited by animals be interpreted sonically? To answer this question, I decided to go with bright, fun, and snappy SFX to capture the upbeat energy of the villagers and environment, utilizing childish sounds like raspberries and lip pops for that extra bit of eccentricity, as well as instrumental woodwinds to capture the forest!
Dialogue Dynamics: Friendship
The dialogue was written and produced by a talented friend of mine, and they had wanted a way to make it dynamically change throughout the game. To accomplish this, I crafted a full dynamic dialogue system in Wwise that was tied to a numerical value called the "Friendship Value". If it went past a certain threshold, then the dialogue interaction would change, giving the player more knowledge about each character and representing progress throughout the game to the player.
Dynamic Music In-Game
RTPC Examples
An Environment That Responds
Another goal I had when creating the SFX for this game was that the player's audio would react to the situation the player was in. What would it sound like when the oven was on, but the player wasn't in the kitchen at all? I did this by utilizing RTPC (Real Time Parameter Control) in Wwise, using panning and quieting certain audio clips to give the illusion of a 3D space while the player moved about or interacted with the 2D environment. It made the player feel more immersed, allowing them to better get in the shoes of their controlled character.
Conclusion
This project, I really wanted to focus on making sure the player felt like they were truly in the environment. I made sure that the soundscape reacted to what they were doing and wasn't static as the game progressed. If they were in a different situation than before, then they'd better believe that they'd hear something different! You can never get fully immersed in something if it feels fake!
