Paint The Town Dead

A fast-paced first-person brawler that combines creative combos and colorful carnage into a unique high action experience. Play as a gauntlet-wielding hero determined to destroy a race of aliens bent on ridding the world of all its color. Slide, uppercut, and slam the cleaners into a pulp as your destruction fills the world with vibrant splatter. But watch out! The cleaners won’t take your wreckage lying down. Dodge attacks and projectiles to stay alive. I was the sole audio designer for this project, having a blast experimenting with a new technique: mixing within Wwise. It opened so many doors for me! I also worked with dynamic music and audio.

Middleware Mix Example: Blood Splatter

Mixing Within Middleware

One of my biggest takeaways from working on this project was learning the strength of mixing within Wwise rather than in a DAW. When you mix in a DAW, you make fully crafted samples that are ready to use, but there is a limited number. Mixing within the middleware removes this issue entirely. You mix the layers for your sound within Wwise to get an almost infinite number of combinations! It was a great technique to pick up!

Mentorship - Sony Santa Monica

I had the pleasure of working with 3 amazing mentors from this project, all of whom came from Sony Santa Monica. They were Antonio Revard, Nic LaCognata, and Justin Bell. Each of them was super supportive and gave me amazing advice throughout. Thanks to them, I got the true Triple A experience, using their criticisms and advice to help push my audio design to the next level, especially from Justin. He challenged me to think differently about how to approach sound design, and gave me some awesome ideas on how to approach certain sounds!

Grunt Enemy SFX Creation

Squishy Enemies

When creating the SFX for the enemies, there was a unique challenge in making them sound like they were more fleshy blobs than actual solid creatures. After all, they are filled and bloated with paint! To accomplish this, I made all of their movements have undertones of squish and splatter, while also making their movement sound gross and squelchy. I had a great time crafting their SFX profile, having to use a lot of interesting objects to get the splatter to sound just right!

Conclusion

This project was one that I gained so much valuable experience from. I learned the power of mixing within Wwise, which elevated my strong Foley skills to the next level! I got some of the best mentorship around from Sony Santa Monica, and because of that, it made me a better audio designer overall! I'll always remember this project as an evolution in my craft, and I can't wait to see how these new techniques help me in the future!