Viking Village
A Viking village turned cavern: scored in Wwise and rebuilt in Unity into a reactive environment with a quest path of whispered voices, torches that cut to black, environmental triggers and custom C# systems.
It started as a one-day brief, take Unity's free Viking Village map and bring it to life with Wwise, on a COVID-era group project at ISART. We kept building well past the brief.
I owned the Unity session (game design and audio systems programming) and acted as audio and creative lead for a team of 7 sound designers, scripting the systems and reshaping the map around the audio.
Role
Audio & Creative Lead, Unity Programming
Team
Adrien Dautel, Baptiste Denoux, Logan Majstorovic, Mattéo Siscaro, Pablo Gomez Mollier, Vinh Anh Buis
Category
Reactive Audio Environment
Tools
Unity / Wwise / Reaper / C#
The overhaul
The original map is an open-air postcard village. Rather than just dress it with sound, we recomposed the space: the background mountains were flipped and turned into the ceiling of a cavern, props were rebuilt, fog and post-process were layered in, and the whole mood shifted from nordic daylight to something submerged and wrong.
Systems
On top of the Wwise integration I scripted the interactive layer in C#: footsteps and fall-velocity detection, a hollowness RTPC tying the wooden structures to the sounds they make, a swimming system, environmental post-process, and a quest-like trigger chain. A network of trigger spheres lays a path across the level: directional whisper cues pull the player from point to point, dolmens rise from the ground, and the route climbs to a crystal on the highest platform.
Staging
The ending plays out in-engine. The torches across the village cut to black, the ambience drops into something darker, and a dragon, animated along a spline beyond the cavern, roars from the distance.
The dragon was supposed to be a joke. The full story, how a one-day Wwise brief became a cursed reactive village, is in the Log: The Dragon Incident.