"POLAR" - UE4 + Wwise Demo

"POLAR" is a project I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. I initially started it as a way to practice using Wwise with UE4 as the majority of my work at the moment is using FMOD and I wanted to make sure I was still up to date with the usage of Wwise. My idea for this demo was to make a short prologue concept for a survival/exploration game set on an icy planet and inspired by both the Subnautica games. I used some free assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace and used the artists demo map as a starting point.

Original assets were created by Julio Juarez.

The map was initially designed to just take still camera shots and short cinematic clips for the artists portfolio therefore I had the challenge of making the level playable for the UE first-person template. This involved a lot of blueprint work for creating the door blowing in the wind, the energy barriers, and triggering the meteors and avalanche. None of these things initially existed but I felt they were necessary to create a good story and they were a good opportunity for some extra sound design and implementation. I also had to extend the map quite significantly to accommodate everything I wanted to include.

A lot of the original level was extended and edited to make it playable.

For the sound design itself I wanted to set the feeling of high tension and immediate danger to the player. I used a lot of destructive sounds to do this with large metal movements, ice shifting, sparks, and loud machinery. I also created an alarm sound that constantly plays throughout the level with a warning message alongside it. Outside, I wanted the sound to sell how bad the weather conditions were with a mixture of the bitter winds and the avalanche being the main parts of this. I created a simple ambient sound system to switch the ambiences between the areas of the level as well as a footstep system using physical materials to determine what surface the player is walking on. I also created a few smaller blueprints for posting Wwise events with certain variables such as an emitter that posted events at a random time between any two given values as well as a BP that I could have a events that would move a long the length of a spline to follow the player which I used for the pool of water in the middle of the level.

Footsteps implementation + wading through water implementation.

Simple ambient sfx system with a special check for the snowstorm to post events from the player sound component.