Ascend is a puzzle adventure game where a young woman must navigate through zodiac trails to learn the secrets of the mountain and restore the world to its harmonious state.
My role on this project is sound designer and implementation. Using Unreal Engine 5 and FMOD as the middleware. I’ve created sound assets, tools, reusable blueprints components for triggering music and dialogue that interact with their respective systems, set up a dialogue editing and importing workflow, and many more things to bring the audio in Ascend to life!
The project is on Steam and set for a release at the end of September 2025.
Implementation walk through of the inspect item sound
The above video shows the work done on the item inspect UI.
I calculated the rotational velocity and used that to feed into an FMOD parameter. For the tarot card sound a loop of two layers are being played while pitch, volume, filters, and reverb are being modulated by the parameter. For the other items, 3 different scatter instruments are being used, each with light, medium, and heavy sounds. The parameter is then modulating volume, pitch, and filters while moving through each of the scatter instruments depending on the amount of velocity.
Quick walkthrough of an audio tool
This tool allows for searching materials to find any that have an unassigned physical material. The footstep system in Ascend switches the footstep sound depending on the physical material it detects, so having materials with a physical material is important to this system.
Instead of manually searching for the materials and checking if they have a physical material I created this tool to speed up this workflow.