09/11 ~ 09/15
This week is the quarter walkaround week. Beside spending time tweaking and polishing the demo we got last week, we assign time for preparation for the quarter early in the week.
Screenshot of presentation material for quarter:
We get suggestions from our advisors about what feedback we want to ask for and how to make sure faculties understand the significance of what we did in the demo. Our purpose is mainly to explain things clearly instead of going to technical on details of our implementation.
Quarter notes:
Here is a summary of the feedback we get:
- We can get outside help from music professional when creating music.
- Be aware that musicians are good for testing purpose, but they are not the whole demographic.
- We need to come up with a detailed testing plan and be clear about how to measure our success.
- Can the music not only react to what the enemy does, but also be influenced by player actions?
- Guests may need guidance to understand what the dynamic BGM is adding to the experience.
- Real world performance on stage might provide inspirations on what we are trying to do.
One thing we noticed was that depends on the guest’s previous musical experience, they tend to have different feeling towards the music changing part. For example, some faculty claim that the while others sat that they can feel the attack is aligned with the beat.
In the second half of the week, we make adjustments correspondingly to the feedbacks, and we realize that the current pipeline we are using seems to have limitations in the long run.
Currently the transition between two music state is done with the help of of the Unreal built in audio modulation functions, utilizing Meta Sound. It works well in this demo’s case where there are only two different versions of music, but it might not work well if we want to add more music layers and control them quickly and freely.
Sound sources and mixers used in the demo:
Updated Blueprint logic for music play back:
Next week, we plan to switch our tool and learn Wwise first before continuing the development process. We want to see if Wwise can make a good fit of our pipeline and make it easier for us to build the function we need.