Lunar Epoch - Sound Design & Implementation within Wwise/Unreal Engine 5

In this Isometric/Top-Down Horror game, I was in charge of all things audio, from creating original assets, composing ‘Safe-Rooom’ music, and implementing all audio systems within unreal. As of right now this game is still in development, but this post will delve into the various audio systems that I have designed so far.

Day/Night Cycle:

In this game, players must plan their actions around the Day/Night cycle. During the day, the player can explore and scavenge for useful items without the immediate threat of enemies. Come nightfall however, players must use their supplies to survive against waves of enemies until morning.

Within the context of this game, we wanted the duration of each Day/Night to be unique to each level. For this reason, we decided to create two seperate counters for Day and Night.

With this gameplay feature in mind, I designed a dynamic ambience system that gradually evolves over time, responding to the each Day/Night counter.

I first created a timer in Unreal that can update a Wwise RTPC each second. I then created a second timer for the Night phase, using a ‘Flip Flop’ node to alternate between the two timers in a loop. As shown in the video above, this RTPC will influence several audio events within the level, such as the ‘Glitching’ sound of Server Towers, and the intensity of the wind. 

Above, you can see how I’ve used a “Countdown Day Duration” variable to determine how long the day phase will last for. This variable is then clamped to a range of 0-100 so it can be used as a percentage. This made it far easier to refine this prototype, as I could change the duration of the day phase and the RTPC modulation would scale accordingly. This helped save a significant amount of time when debugging and playtesting the Day/Night Cycle.