Alex Niemeyer Studios

I thought I would write a small blog post here detailing a fun project that I completed, and give you an update on what’s going on in my studio.

So, the in the past week, I was mingling with folks within VRChat. I usually like to talk about my various interests, such as games and music. One person came over to me while I was talking about this stuff, and it turns out they were an indie game developer! To make this story short, they gave me some useful advice and challenged me to make something in Unity for practice. What they wanted me to make was a music player that had all the controls you’d expect, like play and pause, have the player play the next song when the song your listening to was finished, have the music stored within the player as a scriptable object, and then have another 3D sound play on top of the music. I decided, why not, and I gave this a try.

I want to give a big shoutout to this video tutorial for doing all the heavy lifting in this project.

I started out by setting up the scene. I used a 3D grey block prototyping add-on from the Asset Store, as well as a radio model from the Asset Store.

I then added the controls and then added the music as scriptable objects. It was a bit of a challenge, because I’ve never used C# before this project. I was actually quite happy with how that turned out. I did use most of the code from the video tutorial, but I actually ended up using some of my own code as well. Even though I’ve never looked at C# before, I have some experience in other languages like JavaScript, and knowing how the logic of code execution works on that was immensely helpful in following along the code and figuring out the general gist of how C# is supposed to function.

Finally after all of that is done, I just added a basic sphere in the scene, and added some code that made it movable using the WASD keys. After making it move, I just simply attached a drone sound to the sphere and made sure it was a 3D sound. The game engine did the rest in terms of creating the illusion that the sound was in 3D space. The only other thing I did was routed the music sound and the sphere sound to it’s own audio mixer tracks so I can independently control them.

Overall this was a pretty fun project, and I learned a lot from it. I was unsure if I was going to accept a challenge some random person on the internet told me to do, but it goes to show that inspiration can come from anywhere!

Why the Practice In the First Place

One thing I didn’t mention at the beginning of this piece is why this whole thing came to be outside of meeting the game dev. Well, what the game dev overheard me talking about was participating in my first game jam this month! I wanted to share this news with you all here as well. I am so excited to take my first real steps in the game audio world this coming Friday. I don’t have much information about that because we are supposed to meet on Friday to get assigned our teams and figure what it is we are actually making. All I can say is that it seems to be a record number of sign ups for this event so far.

Keep an eye out on this site because I will absolutely be making a huge post about my experience in my first game jam, and hopefully, will be able to add an actual game to my portfolio page! Stay tuned!