Implementing (and learning) Wwise

I have been following Michael G Wagner’s course on YouTube, which details how to use Wwise with Unity. The course is my only experience with Wwise, and I feel it’s time to branch off into my own project to mess around, get lost, and troubleshoot issues. I am a part of a local meetup group for game development. It has been a solid foundation and introduction to the workflow of the game industry. I messaged the meetup asking if anyone has a spare unity project I could work on (most likely ruin completely ((thank God for version control))). JenniTheDev supplies a project she has used for prototyping.

Oh, boy. It’s time to see if the Wwise course had formed the necessary pathways in my brain. I clone the repo, started to install the missing prerequisites for JenniTheDev’s project. I’m off to the races… well, it’s a glacially paced race as I wait for the Unity progress bar to work its way across my screen.

As I wait, I’m laying out some over-arching tasks I need to solve in my studio to have my work follow industry standards. I’ll detail with follow-up blog posts as I solve and work my way through them.

OK. The correct Unity version was installed. I’m entirely unsure if injecting Wwise from the Wwise launcher requires the Unity project to be opened at least once beforehand, but that seems like a natural thing to do before mucking around with a codebase. I’m going in blind to this project: I’m half curious, half nervous about what I signed up for when it comes to implementing audio.

This is going to be slower than I imagined. I am still a novice at Unity. I hit play on the scene “StartMenu” and am greeted with a horror-type font “PLAY.” Standing in a green field, I am greeted by two squares on the floor. One green, one red.

I note that I’ll need two footstep surface switches, one with a sound that conjures feelings of “green” and a second sound that is “red” in nature. Oh... I step on the green surface. I am met with a woman’s vocalization of being healed, and the HP counter on the top left turns to 120 HP. Next, I muster the courage to step on red. I am bracing for waves of zombies and my screen to be filled with horrible unimaginable scenes. Instead, I am met with a man’s vocalization of pain, and my HP counter drops to 70.

I’m stopping the “Zombies” scene and brainstorming what sounds I want to implement: background ambiance, “grass” footsteps, and red and green button footsteps. I will leave both vocalizations, but I’ll edit them within Nuendo to add some sweetening effects… something that will give you goosebumps. I have a few tools that can turn human vocals into monsters. That might be fun to mess with. Implementing reverb or delay will happen within Wwise. There should be a short “video game-esque” bleep or bloop to denote the HP changing. Maybe a more sparkly effect instead of a bleep or bloop? I would like some ambient noise emitting and beckoning from both squares. That will require moving each square further apart.

The moment of truth. Closing Unity. In the Wwise Launcher, I’m about to hit “Integrate Wwise into Project…”. All the settings look correct. And now we’re off the races…again. This installation isn’t as slow-paced as Unity.
My screen is packed with what you would expect. A blank Wwise project, an empty Nuendo session, and a friend’s Unity project. Now here comes the hard part: sitting down and getting to work.