Game Composer and Sound Designer

UNDERWORLD.exe is a 2D rhythm-based bullet hell game that was developed as a senior capstone project for the Computer Game Science program at the University of California, Irvine. I was the composer and sound designer for this project, and I also did a large amount of our Wwise audio implementation.

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I was more involved in this project than any other game I have worked on. Because of audio's importance in rhythm games, getting all sounds and music implemented properly was a priority. As a result, I was able to spend a great deal of time speaking to the other team members about implementation and making sure that everything worked as intended. I am grateful to have had a team that supports my desire to work with Wwise much more in-depth than I have in the past, and I was able to both re-solidify my Wwise fundamentals and learn a great deal from this project because of it.

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Most notably, we used Wwise callbacks both to determine the timings of enemy and player actions and to move notes on our beat tracker UI element. The beat tracker works similarly to the one in Brace Yourself Games' Crypt of the NecroDancer. White diamonds move from the perimeters of the screen into the middle of the red diamond. When the white diamonds reach the middle, that is a visual representation of where the beat of the music is.

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This project has also allowed me to experiment with dynamic music by adding layers to the game's soundtrack as the boss fight progresses and taking away layers whenever the player breaks their guitar. I have also incorporated Wwise States to play ending sections of a track when the boss is defeated.