Wartorn
Stray Kite Studios
I joined Stray Kite Studios as Junior Audio Designer on Wartorn, working under Audio Director Mason Victoria. My focus was two things: owning the voice-over pipeline end to end, and contributing sound design across spells, environments and dialogue within the game's adaptive audio systems in Unreal Engine 5 and MetaSounds.
Voiceover Pipeline
Wartorn's unit-based combat meant a large volume of VO lines — barks, callouts, reactions — needed to move from raw recording to game-ready asset on a repeating basis throughout production. Doing that by hand, line by line, doesn't scale on a small team with a fixed early-access date. So I used custom Reaper scripts to batch-process and edit VO lines. Scripts helped me to automate tasks such as trimming silence, file renaming according to conventions and batch processing reverb and delay effects.
Once all of the VO was processed. I harnessed the power of data tables from within Unreal Engine 5 automatically assigns each of the Metasounds to the respective unit containing all of our VO files.
Example of our data table. We create a Metasound for each of the bark such as taking damage, moving or attacking. The data table helps us to organize and automatically assign each of the Metasounds to the respective unit.
Sound Design
I designed the sound for unit abilities across Wartorn's 150+ units, each defined by an elemental class and a Mantra. Every ability needed a distinct identity and enough variation to stay compelling on repeat use — a single flat one-shot wears thin fast in an RTS where the same ability fires constantly.
Unit Sound Design Demo
Demon Class Sound Design
Not only does each unit have an element, it also has a specific mantra attached to it. Mantras were developed to help characterize each of the units strategic fighting style as well as personality characteristics. It can help describe what a characters motives or moral values are. This helps inform what the sound design of the ability may be. The sound design of an ability belonging to a character of the Adara class for example, may sound organized, clean and crisp, while a Fervan characters abilities might sound chaotic, messy loud and abrupt!
