Capital University has a great Music Technology program (https://www.capital.edu/music-technology/) and I have collaborated with its director, Chad Loughrige, on a number of projects. One area we have collaborated on is developing simple video game environments for the students of his Audio for Media class to add all the sounds and music to.
I have created two basic first-person-non-shooter game environments in Unity for Chad’s students to work on. These environments used free and low cost assets from the Unity store along with custom coding and other tweeks. They are not full games, rather they are short experiences with 20+ opportunities to add sound effects and music.
Chad and I led the students through a quick tutorial on Unity using these games and then he took them deeper into the FMOD middleware package (https://www.fmod.com/), where they could implement sophisticated looping and zoned music and triggered spatial audio effects.
Although these are more “A” (if that) than “AAA” games, they have provided a platform for the students to dive in on and quickly start using professional tools the audio side.
As of the summer of 2019 I am developing new projects in Unreal. I’ll cover the reasons for the platform switch in a subsequent post. Meanwhile Chad and his collaborators are expanding the opportunities for Music Technology majors to do work on audio for gaming and VR.
