Augustin Carroll

An underwater drone battle

(Okay, technically they’re submarines, not drones.) In this game, players in hypersubs fight to the death in a flooded, abandoned mall. I was responsible for all music, sound design, and implementation. I spent the first two days just developing the music, which was way out of my stylistic comfort zone.

I made a short video to demonstrate some of the unique challenges in implementing the audio in this game, which you can view here. Online multiplayer means that there are multiple “listeners” in the game which hear different sounds depending on certain logical conditions. Because there wasn’t time for complex audio programming, I had to handle this logic within FMOD and create events that were much more complicated than “trigger it, hear a sound.” This project really challenged my logical problem-solving as well as my creativity.

Sound Effects

I’m comfortable with desigining audio for fantasy and casual games, but this was new territory for me! A lot of creating the impact sounds involved me throwing junk around in my basement in front of a mic, which was a lot of fun. To create the ship sounds, I recorded power tools, my pressure cooker’s steam release, some sloshing around in a bathtub, and other things. I think my favorite sound to make was the radio garbles, made from my own voice.

Play the game

Breakwater Arena: New Wave is available on itch.io at https://leftout.itch.io/breakwaterarena and can be downloaded for free.