![]() ![]() There were a number of interesting outcomes of working this way, beyond the memory savings. Additionally, effects like escalating pitch over time on the same sound were a big win for creating sound variability and excitement, without requiring a new asset. Someone would come up with a new way to get a different sound, and then that technique would proliferate into other sounds throughout the project. There were a few of us working in the project at various times, and we borrowed liberally from each other’s tricks. We spent a lot of time exploring different methods to expand our pallet of sounds with our limited toolset. It was real-time sound creation with real-time sound generation! Once I had the basic framework for a sound that I was happy with, I would connect Wwise to Unity via the Wwise profiler, view the visual effect real-time in game, and continue to tune the sound until it fit the gameplay sequence I was creating it for. ![]() By taking generated sounds, experimenting with playback behaviors, DSP, and layering, very quickly a unique sound would be born. ![]() Then, to get some sparkle dust, I could add in a swooshy sound created in SoundSeed Air, with tremolo and more delay. 5 seconds, created using Wwise’s tone generator with various delays added. Let’s say in this case, to create the bleep bloop, it’s a square wave, pitched up over. The first step I’d take would be to make an approximation of the sound within Wwise. Let’s say I wanted to make a sound for a splashy visual effect that burst across the screen when the player achieves a high score, and I wanted it to sound like a sweeping bleep bloop with magic sparkle dust added in. In the end, we were able to ship Peggle Blast with only 1.3 MB of sound effects and 3.5 MB of music, yet it contained hundreds of sound effects and over 30 minutes of interactive music. wav file building blocks that we could manipulate in varied ways to use as layered elements with our generated sounds. wav files were reserved for a few iconic Peggle sounds and specially curated. On Peggle blast, the constraints shaped our daily goal of creating sounds without using any memory. In fact, these constraints contributed greatly to their signature styles and may have boosted creativity. These games were able to achieve iconic audio despite having limitations. Inspiration came from classic games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Pac Man. This new workflow allowed for an immersive development experience, a tighter feedback loop, and a more dynamic product overall. We didn’t work in the traditional way of creating content, where you take game capture and then make sounds to picture within your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). We built sounds using tone generators and Digital Signal Processors (DSP) within the audio engine (Wwise), while matching sounds directly to visuals, real-time, in the game engine (Unity). ![]() To work around the lack of available memory, we used a combination of MIDI and real-time synthesis for audio creation. To give some comparison, Peggle 2 shipped on Xbox One with 783 MB of audio. Having little to no memory is an Audio Designer’s worst nightmare, and we were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to come close to hitting the quality bar we had achieved on our last Peggle project, Peggle 2. Recently, on Peggle Blast, PopCap’s newest mobile addition to the Peggle Franchise, we were challenged by a directive from the team to keep all of our audio content under 5 MB.
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