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As I said in my previous post, one of the ideas I have had for a while for an audio project is the idea of a collection of different soundscapes that I could use or refer to in the future. The general idea is to create an ambient track or experience based around a specific place or idea. That way I can listen to them in the future if I need inspiration for what a certain place might sound like, a pretty useful tool for someone who needs help imagining a scenario.
Firstly, my idea was to create a flat audio file that you can listen to and feel immersed in, as if it were just a synthetic and designed field recording. This would help you imagine being within that environment and inspire work from there. But since starting this work, I have realised it could have further use from being an interactive experience.
Take, for example, if I needed to work on a game that is set in a forest. Obviously it is quite simple to recreate and most sound designers can do it without much help needed. But for that extra bit of inspiration, you could pull up a premade soundscape with extra features you might have forgotten, different types of birdsong, trees, wind levels etc. All of those features could be controlled and interacted with through the use of middleware like Fmod. It could potentially be similar to my Sonification project.
To start of, I thought I would try to come up with some ideas for a soundscape I would like to create and think would be useful in the future. Of course, this means creating a good ol' asset list using Excel.
A thing of beauty, I know.
This gives a good idea of some of the soundscapes I am hoping to create. Giving my time and effort to each one, I hope to at least produce a few of them every so often. Using different layers and samples I have at my disposal, I know that some of these could be very immersive and have a lot of parameters. I will try to keep them fairly simple so I do not get too bogged down in needless ways and that way they will not take too much of my focus away from other projects I am working on.
Eventually I hope to create a large enough collection of these soundscapes that they become useful to others as well. I will share progress and completed soundscapes through my website, blog and twitter. Perhaps having them all set up in a large Fmod project, I would then be able to link them to a unreal project, throw on some UI and reference images, and make it available to download from my Itch.io page sometime in the future.
However this project turns out, I think it will be a good way to get myself back into the game audio workflow and increase my creativity. I am certain something similar has been created in the past, so this is more of a passion project for myself but I am happy to share the process. Let me know if you have any good ideas for soundscapes or tips and tricks. Keep an eye out for further updates!
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