2 Years at Daedalic

Time for a new blog post/update on where my life has been going! In my last work anniversary post I talked about starting and finishing two exciting game projects, namely Pillars of the Earth and State of Mind. I also spoilered about a third game that was in the works which back then I wasn't able to share much about. I am glad to say that we are making a RTS game called A Year of Rain and are close to going into the Open Beta Phase working hard at getting the final touches on this baby.

Another highlight this year was receiving travelling to Cologne with the team to receive the award "Best Story" for State of Mind.

The journey for this game started a good one and a half years ago when I joined soon after finishing work on State of Mind. I got given full creative control over the sound design which was super exciting and a big responsibility that I was very keen on taking on. Since then I have broadened my skillset by not only creating the sound assets for the game but also having to use the middleware software Wwise to implement the sounds into our engine. Additionally I have also been given the overseer role over the music, corresponding with our freelance composers while also composing some of my own music for both gameplay and cutscenes in our campaign.

Balancing the soundscape in a modern RTS game definitely was one of the biggest challenges, especially understanding the capabilites and tweakability of dynamic sound mixing in Wwise. I have written an article about what steps we took to create a clear sound mix for A Year of Rain - once the digital issue of the magazine hits I will link it in here.

In the time working on this game I have had a lot of learnings both on the sound creation as well as the implementation side, switching DAWs along the way from Nuendo to Reaper, understanding the insides of Wwise and Unreal and becoming more familiar with visual scripting in Blueprints.

These technical aspects of the learning process came hand in hand with understanding the craft of my colleagues and what they were doing and how it influenced/overlapped with my work. I have had to communicate a lot with departments like animation, cutscenes, scripting, programming and visual fx and have realised how important this part is in game development. There were a couple of miscommunications, which can be common in a team that hasn't worked together for very long but with time the communication became better once people knew to whom they had to go to ask about their problems.

I am looking forward to seeing the near future unfold and the response to our game by the public. A lot of passion went into this project and I hope that it bears fruit! There is still a list of things to complete until our Early Access Release later in the year and the team is working hard at getting these things done. Hopefully I will have another update when the game steps into the public realm. :)