The Viking Village Part V: A Living World

It’s now been some weeks and I have a completed scene with sound effects, a few NPC’s, and music. Of course, I worked on this in my spare time, so I’m sure this could be done faster (and better), but I thoroughly enjoyed the process.

A few notes on what I learned:

• I ran into some serious issues with placing certain imported assets. I got all sorts of errors in Unity that I had to google and work through. This took a lot of time and I actually got so mixed up, I reset the Unity scene Viking Village. I had stupidly worked without saving often and wasn’t able to revert back to before I broke some things…oops. So in the second iteration I moved a bit slower. I saved more often and imported assets one by one and didn’t move on until I had them set up.
• I went through about three different scripts for implementing footsteps. The only redeeming factor was that apparently a ton of other people had issues with the first two scripts as well. So at least I am not alone! Eventually I googled other ways to script the footsteps and landed with GameDevAcademy which had a really nice blog post about footsteps. So I took the script he wrote and adapted it for my scene.
• Learning Curve: The more time I spent playing around in Unity and FMOD, the more comfortable I felt. This is obvious of course, but this is the first new software I’ve learned in a while. I really enjoy the feeling of learning new things, especially about a subject I’m passionate about. If you’re starting this process or really starting any new software, I have always had a good experience with immersion. I didn’t take a class on these two programs (which definitely would have helped), I just dove in with the knowledge base in my back pocket. YouTube was an incredibly helpful resource and forums were great too. At times the learning process is frustrating, just keep playing around and reading a lot.

So here is a video of me walking through the scene. I mixed all the sounds in FMOD while Unity was running so I could hear how all these sounds interacted. I moved the player throughout the scene to trigger different sounds and had to mix and remix each sound with the music. I was surprised to find some sounds so loud that they covered everything else.

Final Thoughts:

I know this isn’t the greatest scene, nor the best sound design. This was such a learning process and I had to force myself not to be a perfectionist when it came to creating the sound design and mixing. One of the keys in my self-teaching practice here during the pandemic is to keep moving. I could stay locked in on one project and rework it a million times. However, the purpose of these exercises is to learn and develop portfolio pieces.

So now it’s on to the next. Thanks for following me on this journey and enjoy!