Skelemen: "Damn it, Jim, I'm a Sound Designer not a Programmer!"

"Damn it, Jim, I'm a Sound Designer not a Programmer!"

Hey everyone! Recently, I have taken on the challenge of building a Unreal Engine 4 level from scratch, with the soul purpose of being a showcase for my audio implementation and sound design. It has since evolved beyond that (although that is still the end goal/result) and I wanted to log my adventure through blueprints, crashes, successes and failures. I bequeath you, Skelemen.

I started my journey into building a level with no assets, very little experience in level design and implementation using UE4. (See my previous implementation demo on my site) With this one I wanted to take another approach and try something different. In the other demo I had created a  more realistic world for the player character to explore. A.K.A. Human pawn, third person, roaming around a warehouse. Inspiring, right? This time I was looking for a more Indie and cartoony look.

I scoured the Epic Games Market place looking for usable assets that would fit the style I was going for and also mesh together with each other. I stumbled upon some stylized Skeleton characters, a Warrior, and a beautiful hand painted scenery pack.

I added the assets in and started messing around with how I wanted the level to look. I decided that I wanted the player to spawn at one end of the map, travel to the other side of the map, and encounter enemies on the way eventually reaching a 'boss'. This would show; Ambiance, Foley, character design, enemy design and location based sounds.

I ended up with a level that looks like this:

But wait, how did I get here?

To be completely honest with you, not quite sure. By the way, I am not an expert with UE4 or even a level designer. I tried so many different things that just didnt work, tried something else, and then worked another angle until I got it pretty much how I wanted it. I just happened to make a little level and I kinda dig it.Building the level with the assets was the easy part, though time consuming. You just drag and drop assets from the content browser, scale to taste and place. Building the guts of the gameplay in blueprints is whats hard. And by hard I mean the most infuriating, keyboard smashing and satisfying thing to do in a level. 

<-- When it works you feel like a mad scientist 

When it doesn't well.. -->

I won't lie to you and tell you I built the AI system from scratch with my blood sweat and tears. I'd be more proud if I did. However that is not the case. I'm not ashamed to say I used the AI Behavior Toolkit available on the Epic Games Marketplace. As the title suggests, I'm not a programmer. My understanding of blueprints is basic to amateur with a flash of "Oh my god that works. Don't touch anything". In order to make the AI work with the meshes I wanted, I had to do some tweaking.

A brief overview of the AI:

They recognize the player, attack and flee when a certain amount of damage is received. 

The characters, aside from the warrior character, came with only the animations. I had to create the child blueprints, Animation blueprints and blend spaces, and copy the booleans over from the template blueprints.

Particle effects (like his footsteps and the landing poof) were added after everything was set up. (I get deep into ideas and realize "This is an audio demo, Derek. Stop with the flash." But sometimes I can't help myself.) 

That's great Derek but how does it Sound?!

Implementing with Unreal 4 is fairly straight forward. I plan to use Wwise for certain things as UE4 has its short comings but for the characters themselves I'm starting with using Animation Notifies in the keyframe editor.

I created sound cues with random booleans in order to get a different sound every time (i.e. grunts and hammer hits) 

I recorded all my sounds in Cubase Pro 8, slung them into UE4 and rigged them up.

Here's a demo of the progress so far. Ambiance and some player sounds:

https://vimeo.com/205732873

Stay tuned for more!!