A challenge that returns on every project is finding the right "feel" for the audio presentation and communicating player feedback. When working on a licensed project - especially one with the well known pallet of Jurassic Park - audio, music and v.o. require an understanding of audience recognition and nostalgia for the IP.

Naturally I embraced this as the main pillar for audio-direction with regards to newly added behaviours for dinosaurs in the game. This became my focus before I could begin to think about player relevant feedback, establishing memory budgets, defining technical framework for mixing and the scaling nature of a game in which the player can build anything they'd like.

One of the early findings was the apparent difficulty in servicing audience expectations for familiarity while also wanting to avoid fatigue. A more nostalgic ear might prefer the sounds they know from the movies which couldn't cover all of the exposure to behaviour and repeated sightings in the game.

The audio team embraced this challenge as a puzzle to solve: Figuring out what to add, leave alone or update. Senior audio designer Duncan MacKinnon and myself spend the greater part of three months conception and rummaging through the films for answers. We experimented with substitution, re-creation, layering and morphing to find the ingredients that would allow us to add new behaviours (from those seen in the films) and how we could make these sound like a natural extension of the existing sonic palette.

During production of Jurassic World Evolution audio direction matured and I drafted pillars with the team. The goal of those was to create a framework for storytelling that the audio team could fall back on when making decisions.

One of the audio pillars described a diegetic framework for "explaining" the camera within a Content Strategy Management (CMS) game as it is intrinsically linked to the player controlled viewpoint.
For the purpose of building a cohesive audio soundscape, an answer would need to anchor the flow of gameplay and the game-loop. In the CMS game that Frontier Developments builds, the game context switches between observing, managing feedback on the observations and planning strategy accordingly. Sometimes that happens while interacting with the diegetic game-world and sometimes using non-diegetic full screen menu overlays.

To define the camera, I took guidance from the full screen overlays as UI naturally ties the gameplay-loop together.

The more overlay-ed a menu becomes (from side-bar, to full screen overlay) the more "room reverb" is added to Ui sounds. It's another subtle reminder that the player really is somewhere else. Reversely, when a storm rages in the park, a muffled layer is heard when browsing through full screen menus. These subtle storytelling layers link the diegetic world and ui screens together as an experiences.

The audio team ran with it as Music Supervisor Janesta Boudreau licensed a surprisingly large and varied playlist for us. Pablo Cañas Llorente and James Stant worked these tracks into a radio station. I wanted this element in the game to emphasis the remoteness of the islands and also double down on all the returning cast members using far-away comms to talk to the player rather than having a physical location in the game. The radio is broadcasting from the far away shore of Costa Rica and another example of using "location" to inform audio direction.

To underline the distance of the playable areas from the mainland, I used the data available from storms to distort the radio on vehicles. Before a storm hits the radio begins to crackle and break up. The storm is part of a larger world in which the radio signal needs to travel through the ether. I will always look for ways in which audio can tell part of a locations story and having created the storm ambiences and knowing how they worked in wwise, it was a small leap to apply it to the radio too.