In addition to my mechanic design responsibilities, I deliberately chose to take on part of the sound design work for this project.

On the one hand, I believe sound design is crucial for this game. Our experience relies heavily on slow exploration, atmosphere and small interactions rather than complex combat systems. Well-designed ambience, SFX and UI feedback can significantly increase the player’s sense of immersion during exploration, and can make even simple mechanics feel meaningful. As a Mechanic Designer I am also aware that, given our current workload, there is a limit to how many new systems I can reasonably add without overloading the Technical Designer. If I try to push for very complex mechanics, it will create too much implementation pressure; if I only propose very simple ones, they may feel shallow and uninteresting. So instead of just “adding more things”, I want to focus on polishing a smaller set of mechanics and giving them strong, responsive audio feedback.

On the other hand, I am planning to apply for a postgraduate programme in sound design after this degree. I need concrete, game-related sound design work in my portfolio, not only linear audio pieces. This project provides a valuable opportunity for me to experiment with interactive sound, learn the Wwise–Unity workflow, and build examples that connect directly to gameplay. In that sense, the sound work I am doing here supports both the quality of the team project and my own long-term development.

I decided to use Wwise instead of simply importing audio clips directly into Unity, because our game relies more on long, exploratory play and subtle changes in atmosphere than on short linear cutscenes.

In a non-linear game, sounds are triggered by player actions, states and parameters rather than by a fixed timeline. Wwise is designed exactly for this: events can be called from mechanics such as “Press E”, entering a trigger volume, changing reputation, or crossing a certain point on the map. It also allows us to separate ambience, SFX and music into different layers, control their volumes and behaviours dynamically, and reuse the same systems later if the project grows.

From a production point of view, Wwise also scales better than Unity’s basic audio system. Once we have more footsteps, UI sounds and environmental SFX, random containers and switch/State systems can help us avoid repetition and keep the mix consistent. This is important for a slow, exploration-driven game where the player spends a lot of time listening to the same environment.

Finally, learning Wwise is also valuable for my own development. I plan to apply for a postgraduate programme in sound design, and many professional studios use Wwise or similar middleware. Building a small but complete Wwise-Unity pipeline in this project gives me portfolio material that is directly relevant to industry practice.