How do you actually learn to untangle audio in Unreal Engine? Most of us figure it out live, plugging nodes together until something finally makes a sound. It works, eventually. Then the project grows, the voice count climbs, and the whole thing starts fighting you. Strange way to learn something this important.
Who’s presenting
Clara Smith is a Technical Audio Designer, and she has just come off a run at Epic Games working on Fortnite.
Somebody has to sit there and make the sound actually work for millions of concurrent players. For a while that was her. The Chapter 7 Season 2 Showdown feature is on her credits, along with Fortnite’s upgraded hitmarker audio system and a stack of live seasonal events. Custom C++ music plugins and Wwise integrations came before that. Her portfolio is at clarasmithsound.com.
What the session covers
First Steps in MetaSounds is a workshop, not a lecture. Clara starts at the beginning: getting up and running inside MetaSounds, and where audio implementation tends to come apart once a project holds more than a handful of sounds.
The second half is what pays off later. Building systems that scale without breaking your project, which is harder than it sounds. Parent-child architecture, reusable graphs, keeping runtime cost sane when one sound fires hundreds of times a minute.
She has put a project repo up so you can follow along live. Bring a laptop if you have one.
Who should attend
Audio is the discipline most solo devs put off, and an early bad call is the costliest to undo. Sourcing an expert you can reach out to is hard enough. Getting their time to share it is another hassle. Luckily, we took care of that for you.
Last month Tina Merry and Carina Kom of Simply Sweet Games covered pitch compression and objection questions in How to Pitch Your Game Idea. Same idea, different discipline.
Doors are at 7pm tonight, 460 Doyle Avenue in Kelowna.
Ready to level up with Okanagan game developers?