Team Game Production 2: HaberDashers
Project Snapshot
HaberDashers is a 1-4 player arcade-style racer in the vein of Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing. In the game, the player controls a miniature person driving crafted cars of found objects across building-block tracks in various household rooms. HaberDashers is the perfect racing game for a casual, traditional kart racing experience.
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Engine: Unreal Engine 4
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Team Size: 57 people
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Development Time: 5 months
Roles and Responsibilities
The 57-person team for HaberDashers was comprised of 18 level designers (including 1 lead level designer and 1 game designer), 16 artists (including 1 lead artist), 6 producers (including 1 lead producer), and 17 programmers (including 1 lead programmer).
My Title: Sound Designer
My Team Size: 1 Sound Designer, 2 Sound Programmers
Responsibilities
- Create, mix, and master all sound assets for HaberDashers including gameplay sounds, environmental sounds, UI sounds, and music.
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- Balance sound across the game and in menus.
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- Collaborate with artists, leads, and game designer for feedback regarding intended audio tone of the game.
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- Devise and implement a priority system for controlling volume of various sound effects to emphasize the most gameplay-relevant.
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- Collaborate with programmers to design Blueprints to help with sound integration and balance.
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- Iterate soundtrack and sound effects in response to playtester feedback.
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- Compose, mix, and master soundtrack (Main Theme, Kitchen, Bathroom, Victory, Credits)
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- Integrate audio spacialization in accordance with the gameplay environment, such as emphasized reverb in the Bathroom track.
Work Samples
Music
Sound Effects
Project Post-Mortem
What Went Well?
What Went Wrong?
What I Learned?
- The Audio Team was a communicative and effective team that collaborated well between creation and Blueprint integration.
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- By dedicating a team to audio from the very beginning of the project we were able to cultivate the highest level of audio intricacy and quality of any TGP2 game to date.
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- By mixing programmers and designers in the audio team, we were able to predict and architect around many pitfalls and ultimately able to spend significant time bug-fixing and polishing.
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- The game reached a high enough quality threshold to be published to Steam, a first for TGP2 at Guildhall!
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- The team as a whole was forced to switch to an online-only development environment halfway through the project, and were still able to function efficiently and produce quality content.
- With student leadership, the leads team was at first unfamiliar with what information the audio team needed. Initially, communications were below what was needed.
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- Due to faltering communication, the audio team ended up sinking a handful of programming hours into a feature that was ultimately cut.
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- A feature request came from the stakeholders to the audio team unfortunately late in the development process, and ultimately we were unable to complete it.
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- There was some friction between the art team and the design team over the lighting throughout the later milestones of the project.
- Best practices for communication with team members less familiar with audio requirements and development.
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- Unreal Blueprinting including best practices for destroying audio after playing to maintain performance.
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- Tone tailoring to match a less realistic style of audio design (cartoonish).
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- Collaborating with programmers and communicating in ways both designers and programmers can understand.
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- The Unreal systems surrounding reverb, attenuation, occlusion, sound cues, mixers and ambient mixers, sound classes, and building sound priorities.
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- Analysis strategies for studying notable games within a genre to gather information on prioritization, audio effects, and best practices.