5th - 9th December 2022

Now, despite finishing the overall scene, I did want to try to add one more thing before hand in: Sound. 

Sound is something I have enjoyed since I was a child, and I feel that music and ambience can make or break a scene. It can evoke emotions within the player and I can guarantee on a personal level that most, if not all, players have experienced more of an impact from games when music has been introduced. 

Only a few games get this right, with one notable instance being Red Dead Redemption 2, at the very end of the game where the Main Protagonist, knowing he is approaching his death, takes his last ride to the final confrontation with 'That's The Way It Is' playing over top of it. It almost has a sense of finality to it -- of sad acceptance as the player and Arthur (the protagonist) reaches the final showdown with the antagonist. 

Another instance of this is Life is Strange Season 1 -- in the final sacrifice made by the deuteragonist. The Player had, previously, spent months (as the game was released episodically) getting to know and love the character, only to need to sacrifice her at the very end of the game to save the rest of the town. As is similar to Red Dead Redemption, the song 'Spanish Sahara' by Foals plays as the final scene rolls. Again there is a sense of finality in the song, while keeping true to the indie music that had been used for the rest of the game. 

For this particular scene I wanted to stay away from music, and stick with ambience. If I were to go into more detail, I would have done the cinematics outlined as my stretch goals, but in this instance just an ambient sound would be fitting. 

I chose a forest ambience with bird song and other nature noises and then added in a wind sound, as if it is blowing through the branches of my trees, both of which being copyright free under the creative commons license, as my project is non-profit and for personal use only. 

It was important that both of these sounds were downloaded in a .WAV format, as Unreal Engine uses this format for Audio. I brought them in, right-clicked on the sound files and selected 'create cue' before opening up said cue.

I selected 'Loop', saved, then dragged the sounds into the scene, and setting the volume and pitch to 0.5 on each one. This ensured there would be no explosion of sound as soon as the simulation began.