Valley of the Ancient UE5 Redesign

Over the past few weeks I have been working on redesigning the sound for the Valley of the Ancient demo that was released with Unreal Engine 5 early access.

I wanted to get a head start on learning some of the new features of UE5, in particular MetaSounds. I started by stripping out all the original audio (which sounded incredible!), and began to unravel the implementation so that I could adjust it to my own personal preference.

I started replacing some of the more obvious assets like the Light Dart and the destruction FX. Creating these kinds of sounds is never boring so I had a great time experimenting with different textures for the magic. I settled for a slightly more subtle effect for the charge up of the magic and then strong impact and destruction sound.

Creating the ambiences was also interesting because of the inclusion of a custom plugin designed by Dan Reynolds I believe. Although this wouldn't be something included in the engine itself, it was still fun using it and was super convenient!

The level sequences involving the "Ancient One" golem were especially fun to create and I was happy with how big I was able to make it sound which I knew was going to be one of the biggest challenges. It also has a big laser which is always fun. I'm tempted to go back and redo the sound for the laser again. Would be nice to create some more synths in MetaSounds and use them rather than stuff I've created in Serum.

Overall, I was super happy with how it turned out and it's one of my favourite redesigns that I've done. I'm really excited to work more with UE5 in the future and I believe that MetaSounds is going to be one of the next best things for game audio. I really hope Epic adds some more things to the MetaSounds editor on it's full release, especially timelines that can output float values like the ones in blueprints and maybe even some more wacky FX nodes.

You can see my whole redesign here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJsaIoLAKSQ&ab_channel=HarryNixon