Infinity Blade: Ice Lands

Infinity Blade: Ice Lands is a free demo for the Unreal Engine 4, which I created unique music and sound design for. This project was quite challenging for me, as it required me to learn and use some new tools and software, such as FMOD, and Unreal Engine 4, as well as implementation between the two via UE4’s blueprints. The sound design for the most part is pretty straight forward, where audio events are attached to an object, and the closer you get to the object, the louder the audio gets. One of the few exceptions to this is the audio for the character’s footsteps, which I attached the FMOD event to the animation of the character walking to accomplish this.

If I had to pick my favourite audio asset in this project, I would definitely choose the ambient wind that you can hear throughout the demo. This was created primarily via a synthesizer, which manipulated white noise, a low-pass filter with a lot of resonance to add a nice whistling sound, and quite a bit of random automation of the cut-off frequency to add movement to the sound.

 

Ice Lands Music

The music was by  far the most challenging aspect for this demo, because I wanted to make the music dynamic, and change based on which part of the map you were in. If you pay attention to the video, you can see that as the character moves to certain locations, the music will change, adding in more instruments as he progresses through the room. It’s definitely not perfect, and the composition itself could’ve been better to provide a more seamless transition from section to section, but overall I’m happy with how it turned out considering this is my first attempt at something like this.

The real challenge was connecting the FMOD event for the music, and implementing it into Unreal Engine 4 via blueprints. I’ve spent hours learning UE4’s blueprints, and feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible, but it’s something I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, and am excited to spend more time with them going forward.

As always, any comments or feedback is always appreciated, and if you’d like to stay up to date with what I’m working on be sure to follow me on Twitter!