Tanks in Advance
A tank battle game where your actions in previous rounds are recorded and replayed in future rounds. Made in 2023 as part of CMU GCS, where it won best sound. I did sound and music on this one.
Synthesizers and FMOD
When approaching sound for this game, there were two things I knew starting out. The game was going to have a futuristic look and use a lot of post-processing bloom, and that it was going to take place over multiple rounds that got progressively more intense.
To that end, I used Ableton’s Wavetable synth to generate most of the sound effects, modulating pitch and volume of waves to get the core of the sound. Then I added a layer of white noise and modulated it similarly to add some impact to the sound. Most of the one shot sounds in the game are variations on this idea.
As for the music, since I didn’t know exactly how many rounds there were going to be, I created one track that heavily used synth pads to match the visual aesthetic, and wrote a couple of layers of intensity on top. I then exported each track separately, and created a system in FMOD that allowed the programmers to change a variable called “intensity”, which would fade in the different layers. This way, if more or less rounds were needed, the programmers could just change the round numbers that the “intensity” variable was changed, without requiring a reworking of the music system.