Masters Finished!

And just like that, my postgraduate studies are over!

Here's a little blog post on what I've been up to.

Final Project

Over the summer I have completed my final project for the Sound and Music for Interactive Games Masters at Leeds Beckett. The project itself was a study into the impact that different adaptive scoring methods for games have upon immersion across differing scenarios. Over approximately 3 months I created three game levels using Unreal Engine 5.6's new game templates and devised methods for music to adapt to changes in them for Horizontal Re-sequencing, Vertical Layering and Ornamental Layers (stingers).

The first game was a Parkour level, where the player has to make their way to the end in as short a time as possible. A Driving game was next which had players driving around a track to get the fastest time possible. The last game made was a Shooting level, where players would shoot targets to score as many points as possible in a minute. All fairly simple levels, easy to recreate and they allowed me to focus on the adaptive score implementation.

The actual study involved players being divided into groups for the separate variables, answering a questionnaire, playing the levels for 10 minutes each and then answering another questionnaire related to their immersion. The findings were interesting in that they suggested that a combination of adaptive techniques actually impacted immersion more so than just the use of individual techniques. Some participants did notice when certain techniques were in use, whereas others noticed changes in the music that were not part of the test. The study struggled due to a lack of willing participants, so the results cannot be fully supported. Overall, the study showed that Vertical Layering and Stingers scored better for immersion, plus the study provides a method for testing these techniques in scenarios that have not been tested before. If anyone is interested in reading my report on the study just let me know and I'll send it across.

Sound Designer at Xiaofanchuan Games!

That's right, I am finally a "professional" Sound Designer. A job I had applied to in January this year reached out to me at the end of August, asking if I would still be interested in being part of the team at Xiaofanchuan Games. Of course, I gladly accepted and joined the team working on their project False God. The team is made up of volunteer individuals from across the globe working in their spare time to create False God, directed by the game's creator Xiao. False God is a Chinese folklore and Lovecraftian horror inspired survival horror game that is currently looking for funding. Check out more about the project here: https://www.falsegodgame.com

In terms of my role, so far I have mostly been creating unique sound assets for certain systems in the game. I have also been brought in to help with sound implementation and some technical aspects, however I have not been able to get as involved with this aspect as of writing this due to working on finishing the Masters. Of course, this being a volunteer role, I am still on the lookout for other jobs, applying whenever they pop up. But for now, I am having good fun creating cool sounding assets and getting creative finally, its been a long time coming but finally getting to work on a game and show off my own skills is suuuuper rewarding.

Extra

In other news, the Sonification module I was teaching at Futureworks has been replaced with a technical sound design module as part of a change up to the course. The course itself has been renamed to Game Audio and the module I teach in 2nd year is now Adaptive Music instead of Interactive Score. The first semester has gotten off to a good start, with a higher number of students than usual who all seem interested in the module, which is great to see. Now that my study for the masters is over, I feel very qualified to be teaching this particular module.

I've also had a great summer. I volunteered at Game Audio Symposium 2025 which was a lot of fun, there were a lot of great talks and I made some great connections. First time I attended was in 2024, this year I volunteered, who knows, maybe some day in the future I'll be up there doing a talk to a room full of game audio people. I also won a year's subscription to Soundly, which has been of great use for my portfolio work. Also, as my last post on this blog talked about, I've been doing some fun Foley recordings. A couple extra things worth mentioning: I got to attend the Royal International Air Tattoo air show, a childhood dream of mine, plus I was lucky enough to see the last Black Sabbath show this year too.

So, I'll be working away at False God and teaching Adaptive Music, plus I'll hopefully post in a bit more depth about my final Masters project and some of the sound redesigns I have been working on. But, for a short while, I'll have myself a little well-earned break. Huge thank you to those who completed my study as participants over the summer, I really appreciate the help and putting up with my silly games. For the Masters itself, I owe a huge thank you to Dave Raybould, Joe Thom and Naomi Hart for all their help throughout, I wasn't sure I'd be able to get through this course in one year, but thanks to them it went by without too much struggle. For anyone who is curious about the course, I'd be happy to chat about it, just reach out.

Thanks for reading!