Project Promotion

Your boss has replaced you with AI Efficiency Robots, and it's about time you took a stand! Project Promotion is a tactics office game where your goal is to climb the massive tower of Omega Corp and confront the evil boss who so needlessly replaced you. I was the audio designer of this project. I handled the entire audio-scape, including the composition, synthesis of sound, foley work, and Wwise implementation. This was my first delve into synthesis work, and I learned a ton!

Audio Direction: Synthesis

One of the main issues we ran into with this project was what we wanted our sound profile to be. We had 8-bit visuals, suggesting chiptune, with 3D assets accompanying them in scene, suggesting something more modern. So, I took this opportunity to propose synthesis, a happy medium between the two. I used Vital to synthesize most of my SFX.

My Process of Synthesis

Music Adaptation

The goal of the music was to give more depth to the personality of the classes. However, the music in this game took a massive turn half-way through the project. Originally, the game had a battle scene, in which the player would then hear a certain theme dependent on the class who was the aggressor. However, that was then removed. To remedy this, I made the soundtrack dynamic within Wwise, having new instrumentation slot into the level themes dependent on what class's turn it was.

Dynamic Music In-Game

Character SFX Analysis - Botanist

Character Expression

Another goal of this game was to make sure each class felt unique from an audio perspective. To make sure this happened, I used specific and recognizable audio clues to further reinforce the class the player was taking control of. The Salesman used lots of vocal shouts, since salesmen usually do a lot of talking. The Botanist had a lot of plant and organic sounding assets, representing their connections to nature.

Leit Motif

This was my first project fully composing all of the music, and I have much less experience in that field than I do SFX creation. To remedy this issue, I relied on using a Leif Motif throughout all of the tracks in the game. It centered around a modified version of the A-key's Locrian scale, opting not to lower the 2nd scale degree while keeping the lowered 5th. This familiarity throughout the soundtrack's creation made the process much more efficient, since I knew exactly where I needed to start every time on my keyboard.

Removed Combat Themes

Wwise Shell Walkthrough

Preparing for Everything

At a certain point in the project, we had a major stall on the art pipeline when it came to animation for attacks. Thanks to that, I was unable to have proper references for making SFX. To combat this, I normalized the length of all attack SFX to allow myself a head start, communicating this with our artist so that we wouldn't be impossibly far behind. Also, I set up the Wwise's shell beforehand, so any SFX I created would be plug-and-play, without any need for any extra implementation, further speeding up the pipeline.

Conclusion

Through this project, I learned a ton about what made synthesis incredibly useful for my audio tool bag. Before, I struggled to make things like magic sounds and techy sounds when just using foley work. Now, I have a much more streamlined and effective way to capture that sort of sound profile using synthesis. In the future, I want to keep exploring this sound of audio design, and further deepen my understanding.