Light of Alariya
Project Snapshot
Light of Alariya is an open-world, third-person, exploration puzzle game in which you traverse the ancient alien temples and ruins to restore the power of the stars and awaken your sleeping civilization.
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Engine: Unreal 5
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Gameplay time: 1-4 hours
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Platform: PC
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Production Time: 6 months
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Steam link: here
Project Information
Light of Alariya was developed over a 6-month production timeline from May to December 2022 by a team of 27 master's students from SMU Guildhall as part of the program's capstone Team Game Project (TGP) curriculum, along with 26 musicians and voice talent from SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Light of Alariya marks several ambitious "firsts"—it is SMU Guildhall's first open-world game, and was the first game built in Unreal Engine 5.
My Role
As a sound designer In the formal production stages. Besides making sound effects (the main character's foley, whip, ship and some puzzle parts like crystals, beams, mural pieces, etc.), I also worked on the blueprint to implement all the sound and music assets.
As a level designer participated in early-level design development like brainstorming, level layout, and puzzle design.
Development: As A Sound Designer
Metasound is the new advanced audio solution in Unreal 5; it provides all basic sound generators and processors to allow designers to build audio-related functions from 0. To get familiar with these creation kits, I made a procedural module to generate the main character's whip sound, without using samples.
To contribute my value to the team, my job is focused on sound assets production and implementation in the following production milestones.
The original whip sound
With the iteration of the game, the final material of the whip changes to magic energy. I added the magic material layer and divided the sound into 2 parts: attach and recover:
The magic whip sound
The whip recover sound
Besides asset production, most of my time is spent working on the blueprint for sound implementation and other related functions. In my working experience, Audio Middleware and programmers can provide lots of convenience in this part, but I should do it all by myself in this project. After communicating with programmers and other designers, I finished most of the implementation job.
Use a simple rotation object as an example: It is a crystal that the player can rotate. I want the sound to start playing when the player rotates the object and stop playing when the interaction is stopped. Maybe it's easy for a programmer to realize this function, but I need to think about all the logic, figure out how the original blueprint works, and where to insert my nodes. The green parts in the image below demonstrate how I achieve the function.
Blueprint 1
Blueprint 2
The sound can be played as I intend in the game:
The final reslut
I also added essential audio functions like indoor reverb, the ducking system, and triggers for music and ambiance to switch.
Early Stage: As A Level Designer
Most of my job at the early development is focus on brainstorm, contribute my ideas, make map and cooperate with other peers to build white box in Unrea Engine.
The image below is the teaching level I designed at the Proof of Concept Tech (POCT) stage. The goal is to teach the player how to use the whip to interact with objects. The player will use the whip to swing between each attaching point to learn this basic moving skill (the red circle on the map); then use the whip to drag the trigger (the purple square on the map) and enter a cave. Enemy ambush will attack the player in the cave, the player should quickly run away and use the whip to drag another trigger at the end of the cave (the purple circle on the map) to block enemies' catching up. He will use the whip to hit the hanged object and make it drop to kill enemies below. Keep moving and use the whip to hit the rock(the dark gray object on the map) and it will slide and accelerate to drop on the seesaw and raise the seesaw for the player to jump down. The final part is a small puzzle: the player should use the whip to drag the rock and put it on the button (the dark red button on the map) to raise the platform and move to the end.
All the whip-related mechanics include swinging, dragging and moving an object, hitting an object repeated at least 3 times to enhance the player's learning of these basic skills.
The vertical view of the map
Postmortem
What went well?
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Get familiar with UE5: I can make use of new features, especially Metasound and build some useful stuff.
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Good communication with team members: I greatly benefit from exchanging ideas and cooperating with programmers and other designers. Get a high score in peer evaluation.
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Implement sound assets with blueprints: I can realize some audio functions with blueprints.
What went wrong?
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Took a long time to make a music trigger system but just partially worked: Because the character can drive a boat to slide on the sand, the original trigger system can only recognize the character when she is not driving the boat.
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Didn't have enough time to work on the sound effects, and some interactable items didn't have a sound.
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Nearly crunch every day to learn and produce assets.
What I learned?
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Oral communication is more efficient than typing words.
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The first job for a looping sound implementation is determining if the program is updated every frame.
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For the default setting, the listener is attached to the camera, which will cause wired sound spatial attenuation as it is different from the character's position.
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Before making a trigger, you need to know if other invisible things are attached to the main character; sometimes, it will activate triggers before the characters' bodies enter the triggers.