Combat in Reave is physics-driven and player-controlled, meaning every swing, clash and impact must feel immediate and grounded. Because the player’s physical movement directly drives combat, the audio needed to reinforce weight, speed and contact precision without becoming repetitive or overwhelming in VR.

Spatial audio is a crucial component in creating an immersive environment for VR games. Get the spatial audio right and players will feel completely immersed in the VR space. But get it wrong, and it could take players out of the experience altogether. Or, even worse, could make the user feel uncomfortable and want to take off their headset.

When defining the role of sound in your video game, it is important to define early on sound design’s primary functions within your game. Is it enhancing immersion? Guiding players? Providing feedback? Increasing player’s awareness? Making the player feel powerful? Setting the emotional tone of the experience? 

Sound has the ability to do all of these things and more.

A common mistake beginning sound designers make - and I was certainly no exception to this, is using too many noisy source elements in the construction of their sound effects. Or not taming that noise adequately enough.

These are some of my favourite free plugins that I use daily as a freelance sound designer for video games.

Serum is widely known among the sound design and game audio community as a powerful software synthesizer. But maybe less known is the fact that it can also be used as an effect insert. 

I wanted to share a bit about my process of designing and implementing sounds for mobs in an Action Role Playing Game (ARPG) like Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem.

The goal of this project was to start to learn how to implement audio inside the Unreal Engine. I specifically didn’t want to use middleware for this, so I could get a handle on Unreal’s native audio tools without relying on the familiarity of using something like Wwise. I also wanted to get to grips with Blueprints and see how I could apply them to some of the audio systems.

The level I used for this showcase was the free Soul City project from Epic Games.