Tales Of The Forest – UE5 Technical Implementation

September 2022 – May 2023

Game Engine
Unreal Engine 5

Additional Tools
Wwise
Project Acoustics

Project Description

‘Tales Of The Forest’ is a third person short story puzzle game set in a fantasy world. You play as a forest creature in a region of this world surrounding the mountain ‘Averneth’ and navigate through forests, lakes and caverns to find your path. The soundtrack of this game is intended to help guide you, be it in the ambiences, the objects or the music.

This project serves to explore the use of sound design and audio implementation to help guide narrative of video games and includes a rich soundscape to immerse the player in the world they are exploring. Considerations towards this goal include the use of audio objects, surround music mixing, ambience layering and geometry informed reverbs using Project Acoustics.

Dynamic Ambience Layering

A large focus of this project was ensuring that the environments the player explores sound appropriate in context, while balancing the detail to aid in immersion without distracting the player from what they are doing.

By creating ambience zones within the level that fade into one another, it ensures that the ambiences the player hears are always different wherever they are on the map without being so contrasting that distract away from the player’s objective.

To create a more cohesive and believable ambience, sweeteners were added to each area that create a common ambience, this helps to tie together the ambience zones so that the ambience appropriately changes as the player explores.

Geometry-Informed Reverbs (Project Acoustics)

It’s important to explore new tools in game audio, which is why Project Acoustics (PA) was chosen for ‘Tales Of The Forest’. PA uses wave-based simulation to create accurate reverbs and occlusion based on in game geometry and materials.

The use of PA within this game was to not only show how it works functionally, but to explore where it’s appropriate to use it and where it may be better to use more creative, and as a result, less accurate audio environment tools.

Within this project, PA is used in every level of the game, however isn’t always audible. Due to the simulations done by PA, particularly in exterior environments, the reverbs generated were sometimes underwhelming. In these instances, a creative decision was made to also implement algorithmic reverbs and delays as appropriate. This can be heard in the first scene where PA only produces a small amount of the reverb heard.

This wasn’t always the case though. PA did a good job with interior environments, especially when the dimensions of the room change, such as in the first cave scene of the game. The change of room dimensions is of particular note as it changes the reverb reactively as the player travels through the level.

Considerations For Non-Stereo Formats

Since the beginning of this project’s development, the foundations of the audio implementation were made with consideration for audio formats larger (and smaller) than stereo.

Largely this was achieved through the use of audio objects, an audio pipeline that delivers metadata (such as position and orientation) along with each audio object so that the end listener’s audio system can render the audio appropriately, whether they have headphones, a 7.1.2 system or any other audio configuration.

It achieves this without the need to fold down too, which achieves a more accurate representation of audio, regardless of speaker configuration.