Sound is important in any game. Try playing your favourite game muted and I guarantee your experience, while probably still a good time, just won't be as good. Whether it be the satisfying crunch of punches into the bad guys, or birds chirping as you stroll through a peaceful forest, all games are enhanced by the sounds within them. This goes doubly for games aiming to be an atmospheric, reflectional experience - of which Obscurity is one.

Despite this, Obscurity had almost no sounds by the time it was first being playtested. The experience just wasn't resonating with players like we wanted it to, and so we went back to polishing. Put in some atmospheric background noise and satisfying sound effects and all of sudden we have a far more engaging experience for our players. And this is all thanks to a little thing called FMOD.

Chances are if you play games you've seen this logo before. Everything from Celeste to World Of Warcraft is using FMOD to handle their sounds in some capacity, and after implementing it into our development for Obscurity it's easy to see why. Like any new tool it some time to get a grasp of how this thing worked, but after going through some documentation and and fiddling around in our project for a few hours we did it - we made a button go beep.

Obviously this on it's own isn't particularly special. I could make a button go beep in unity any day of the week. So what makes FMOD different? For starters, FMOD sounds are directional. If the sound is playing to the left of the player, the player will hear it louder through their left headphone/speaker. Too far from the sound? It'll be quiet, or maybe even too far away to hear. This already builds a level of immersion that, while possible with regular unity sounds, is made so much more simple through FMOD.

In-engine visualisation of effective sound range on an object

But the FMOD goodness doesn't stop there. FMOD sounds are created as events, which can be triggered a variety of ways. Of course, code can be called to play any of the sounds through any object, but it also can be done with triggers, collisions, timers and much more. These events can be given start conditions, stop conditions and even be set to only be able to play a single time. All this means that even our artists can implement sound effects throughout the project using little to no code, which also makes testing these sounds a breeze.

Since integrating FMOD we've added sounds for buttons, pressure plates, collectables, footsteps, ambience and more, with more on the way such as clanks for when thrown objects hit things. Before FMOD this would've been a repetitive, fiddly task. Now, it's easier than ever. We hope you look forward to a more immersive Obscurity experience in the near future, and a big thanks to FMOD for making such a great tool, and having it be so accessible to creators.