Multimedia Composer, Orchestrator, Transcriber, Storyteller
Tavern Crawl
Development
Role: Audio Director and Producer
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Duration: 8 Months, Audio Team entered 4 months in
Game Info
Genre: Hack n' Slash, Action, Adventure
Platform: PC/Mac
Status: Complete
Team Size: 34
Project Summary
Tavern Crawl is a student-made, 3rd-person adventure starring Fish, a young countryside mouse who dreams of adventure. His kingdom uses alcohol collected from the city they live below as currency, fuel for fires, and resources to craft delicious and useful cocktails. When the alcohol mysteriously dries up, Fish volunteers to leave his home and investigate where the precious resource has gone.
My Contribution
Tavern Crawl is by far the largest scoped project I have worked on as of May 2022, and also my first experience in Unreal Engine. For this project I was the Audio Director and Audio Producer, my first time on this position, and at first I was quite nervous. I knew the members of my audio team pretty well and I had confidence in their abilities, but I myself felt a good portion of imposter syndrome. This quickly faded once we met the developer team and we started working through what needed to get done. I knew how to organize and streamline asset tracking across multiple teams of people before thanks to my prior experiences on past games, and I was able to apply that perfectly here. I revised my spreadsheet that keeps track of everyone's asset progress and made sure the developers also knew of this spreadsheet that they can reference when they implement the music in engine.
The hardest task for this game was getting our sonic vision clear to the developers. They clearly had a lot on their plate in terms of the scope of the game, and unfortunately audio did not get as much attention as anyone would like. We had to compromise, despite getting all of our assets in a full two weeks before final launch, there were still some things we had to cut down scope-wise to even make sure our assets got in the engine in the first place. With a long list of sound effects, reaching over 70 unique sound effects for this game, and only a team of 4 audio members including myself, I had to step in and assist our Sound Designer who was getting more than overwhelmed for this project at the time. Overall, this was a good lesson in team management as well as keeping in good communications with the developer team. If I know how things are going on their end, I can gauge how big of a scope our sonic vision is for the next project.
