Post-Mortem


So early on the idea was to have images and sound effects to go along with locations and story events to help immerse readers into the story. I still think it's a good idea, however; I realized a day or two before submission deadline that there was no way for me to complete both by myself. So considering I do sound professionally, I felt it more important to hear things and learn FMOD, then to make some really generic art. This is the first project I've completed using FMOD for audio in Unity and because of this I had no previous workflow to follow and had to simply "feel things out".

The Problem
I put the entire story's sounds into one sequence. Doing things this way meant making changes to the timeline after it was set up, a painstaking process. This meant for every dialogue choice, I would need to jump around the timeline with destination and transition markers and edit in sounds for those transitions. Additionally it meant if I wanted to extend how long a loop in the middle of the sequence was, I needed to relocate everything after it. It was became a mess I was afraid to touch at a certain point.

The Solution
I realize now that the most effective approach would have been to have the all of the ambiances and looping car sounds in one event.
This way I can transition between the layers with one parameter when changing locations without having a lot stuff further down the timeline that would need adjusted after edits. This would also help to prevent unintentional nudges to sound effects in the correct place. Then I can  fire a one-shot sound effect for each story event  that doesn't loop.
I used Inksy for the first time as well (for the dialogue) and I was calling sound events with tags like "#sound:shovel" or "#advSound:DriveAwayInt" etc. I would certainly change "#advSound:castleEnter" into something like "#amb:castleExterior" to add clarity of what type of sound is being affected. This would mean more tags marking up the Inksy file, but that is far less effort than sliding around a ton of sounds in one big sequence.

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