I believe it was 2012 when I first took a class to learn how to use Wwise.
I’d been extremely fortunate – and worked my butt off – to contract doing some dialogue work for the first Destiny game.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I asked Bungie’s audio director at the time what first step I needed to take would be if I wanted to go into games full-time. He told me to learn go learn Wwise.
And so, I did.
I took Leonard Paul’s Wwise course over at School of Video Game Audio – and it served me very well. I don’t think I did particularly fantastic at the time – I had plenty of years doing audio, but I also wasn’t a sound design hotshot. I learned at that point that I probably wasn’t going to turn into that, either.
Humorously, the thing I remember most was this – I felt like I was annoying the living hell out of Leonard because it took me forever to understand how to hook sounds up into the demo game for the course.
I don’t mean that I didn’t understand how to use Wwise – that came pretty easily. Thankfully even then Audiokinetic had quite a few resources out at that time and Leonard had plenty of information to share as well.
What I mean is, I didn’t understand the handshake between Wwise and the game engine itself.
What if I wanted to add a sound to a part of the game where an event didn’t already exist?
How could I implement – or code – my own custom sound triggers?
It drove me crazy. I certainly felt like I drove poor Leonard crazy.
The story of how I resolved that madness at the time is a little hazy at this point. It was quite a while ago, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount about games and interactive audio since.
But I do know that I figured it out, and there were almost no resources on that kind of thing for non-programmers at this point. Or, “technically inclined” sound designers.
Today – thankfully – it’s a lot easier.
The Wwise Unity Integration is a single button click now, where back then it was a separate executable that didn’t always run right locally for whatever reason.
The code is quite a bit easier too – definitely not out of reach for any sound designer who views the whole “engineering” or “programming” thing as this magical, complicated, unintelligible black box.
I truly mean that too – all of those feelings about how “scary” code is and how if you touch the wrong button you’ll break everything – they’re considerably over exaggerated.
So, I’ve made a course to prove it to you – and it’s officially available today.
I’ve spent the last ~3 months developing and creating all of the content for this, for a few reasons.
- I don’t want anyone to ever feel as stuck as I did 6 years ago, and unable to find help for extremely simple code
- I don’t want any audio professional to feel like basic – yet extremely useful – programming is out of their reach
- I want to give you something new to increase your value as a provider of professional audio services
- I want you to see the reality of just how close you are to doing incredible, creative things with interactive audio just by learning a little C# code
- I was accepted to a C++ certificate program a few months back, my goal was to pay for it before the end of the year by providing as much value to you all as I could – this will have me cross the finish line
Two people have gotten a preview of the course, as of last week, and they had this to share:
“It’s literally ideal for people like me who are more creative, want to know enough not to be stupid, and can pass it off to others without being a moron.”
“The best video on the whole thing was ‘when to stop and let the programmers take over’. It’s such a grey area like you said, and I caught myself doing all the wrong things on a project a while back. Luckily, it worked out well because it was a simple project. But, I can easily see how that would get messy on anything more complex. Had I watched that beforehand, I definitely would’ve been more hesitant. But, it’s easy to get caught up when you don’t know, what you don’t know.”
As I said, the course is available for you to purchase right now.
After you purchase – you’ll learn how to use C# to play sounds, use switches, states, RTPCs, load and unload soundbanks, mess with interactive music, and more.
But the biggest value for you isn’t even in what the videos show you – it’s in what will unlock in your mind as you start following along and applying the concepts I show you.
I’m not a brilliant sound designer – I’m not showcasing mind blowing examples that make you feel intimidated and as if I’m on some higher plane of creativity than you.
You’re going to get done with this course, and the power that will be in your hands to make your own sounds work just the way you want them to is going to cause you to run circles around me, and plenty of your peers.
You think that level of prowess is really far away from you – that it has to be hard.
I promise, it isn’t.
I’m happy to show you, so I made C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity. You can bypass the drudgery of trial and error, digging deep into documentation, making plenty of mistakes and feeling like an idiot for not understanding what you keep hearing are easy concepts.
I’ve done all the hard work for you, and I’ve made it available for you to take advantage of.
One last thing. Perhaps the most important thing.
This is the part where I openly admit that I’m messing with your fear of missing out.
There’s artificial scarcity built into this product launch. I’m only making 25 copies available today. I have good reasons – let me explain:
- I’m a one person operation. 13 people have preordered already – I had to set them up for access and rebuild the entire back end course system all day Saturday because it wouldn’t give new customers instant access correctly. I don’t want to handle more than 38 people having issues all at once. All that’s real – I want this to be as perfect as possible for you and me, and not to die if it isn’t.
- I can already see great ways to upgrade the course, hopefully, in 2019. I want to take limited, committed customer feedback and put that into action. If I do that – the price also won’t stay the same.
- I shamelessly like having a little exclusivity built into what I do. The things I make are not for everyone. I have a handful of people who jump on the opportunity to support most everything I do, and I love to reward the people who support me. I do that by keeping early prices low, not begging that everyone buy my products, and paying real close attention to the people who do.
I don’t have to justify that to any of you – but I think it’s useful for you to know my motivations sometimes.
On the other side of that, this is where I’m going to convince you not to go buy the course if it isn’t for you.
Yes, there’s some built-in artificial scarcity. But I can promise it will become available again. If you miss out now – you’re not truly missing out forever. I just can’t promise you’ll get this exact same version at this exact same price.
So, if you’re on the fence and you’re unsure that programming is a thing you need to learn, or you just feel like you should be a jack of all trades – I’m totally with you and understand if you opt-out for now. No hard feelings. I don’t want you to feel super pressured if you’re not sure it’s right for you. If you have to question it, then it probably isn’t right.
If you are struggling financially – do not buy this course. End of story. I can’t stop you – but I sure as hell can implore you not to make a bad decision. Pay your rent, feed yourself, worry about courses later.
Besides those things, if any of these thoughts hit you:
- You understand Wwise, but you’re frustrated by the disconnect putting your sounds in Wwise versus getting them to play in-engine
- You’re really excited about moving into an implementation or “technical sound design” role
- You recognize the value your career would gain if you were better at speaking with your team’s programmers, or you wanted to connect with them and learn more about programming
- You want to make your own cool games or experiments with Wwise and Unity, or want to learn more about how they work with C#
This course is for you. I mean you – the person reading these words. I don’t know your name (unless this is going directly to your email) – but I’m writing this, thinking about speaking to you directly.
I wanted to help you learn what I worked to figure out mostly on my own.
So, I made C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity.
Check out what I’ve written about it, consider if it’s right for you – and if it is – buy it.
If it’s not – we’re still cool, I promise. I appreciate you regardless.
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