The Dragon Incident

The brief

March 2021, deep in COVID. Mathieu Fiorentini briefed us one morning: take Unity's free Viking Village map, split into groups of six or seven, bring it to life in Wwise. Wind, water, torches, village ambience. A clean exercise.

I was done by noon. I told Mattéo Siscaro and Vinh Anh Buis I was going to nap and left them to sort the group out. I came back to find the Fantastic Four already assembled, the best people I knew and the most relentless shitposters in the promo. We were off-scope before the exercise had even started.

The dragon

When Mathieu asked if a group wanted to pitch their ideas, I put us forward. We listed the obvious stuff, wind, water, the torches, and then I asked if we could put a dragon in the valley. He laughed and said sure, as long as we sound-designed it down there. No problem.

Big mistake. By that evening we were in the session looking for a 3D dragon.

Tearing the map apart

The map shipped as an open-air postcard, mountains and sun in the background. The sun bothered me, so I flipped the mountains upside down and made them the ceiling of a cavern. I grabbed windmill wheels and built a giant structure hanging off that ceiling. The whole place went dark and submerged, and it kept escalating from there.

We found a car on the asset store, dropped it in the village, repainted it as wood so it sort of passed, and put Mathieu's music inside it. None of this was in the brief.

The quest

Under the staging I scripted the interactive layer in C#: footsteps, fall-velocity feeding a fall sound, a hollowness RTPC on the wooden structures, a swimming system, post-process. The quest starts when you jump on a fish, with Taric's Japanese voicelines from League. A hammer rises out of the water behind the statue. You get close, the ambience drops, the screen blurs, and every torch in the village goes out. You are still wondering where the dragon is.

That is when the whispers start. We recorded them as a team and I scattered them on trigger spheres across the map, in two layers. The primary ones are directional and pull you along a path, "Mathieu, viens ici", with a "reviens" that fires when you wander too far. The secondary ones are pure ambience and pure shitpost, the promo's running gags hidden in the dark. One sphere drops a random "SHAUN" on you from across the map, a nod to a Heavy Rain bug.

The path runs through seven or eight spheres. At the last one, dolmens rise out of the ground and lead up to a crystal on the highest platform. You climb, you reach it, and you are locked in place. The dragon roars from behind the cavern, animated along a spline, then again as it passes the entrance a kilometre out. Then the car, long gone by now, comes straight at your face with music over it. Black screen. And in-engine, the buggy Skyrim cart meme: you are finally awake.

The grade

We got a 14. Not for the scope. Mathieu's grading is Mathieu's grading, and we had exported the whole thing in WAV instead of converting to Opus. Fair.

The crew

Adrien Dautel, Baptiste Denoux, Logan Majstorovic, Mattéo Siscaro, Pablo Gomez Mollier and Vinh Anh Buis, with me on the Unity session. Briefed and graded by Mathieu Fiorentini.