Glossop Line -
Manchester-Hadfield & Glossop

I've been living in Manchester since I started University in 2019, so I was super excited to finally get started on this DLC. I was also ahead of schedule so was able to go into some fantastic depth when developing the detail sounds for this route aswell as developing some new tech. 

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I started off by creating a route map and research document; marking down points of interest, researching each, and collating it all into a research document.

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I proposed a wind spline that we could place along tree lines, which would then read the global wind strength variables to control the blend of various wind loops organised by strength. 

Matthew Tomlinson got it set up with some bird sounds local to the area, before passing it over to me to implement the wind strength loops; getting them to blend smoothly. 

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A spline is a path that we create for an audio source to follow. It doesn't stray from this path and always maintains the closet proximity to the player as possible, without leaving the designated path.

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The route audio was passed to Rivet games as I was moved to a different project, but I was able to handover my current work for use on the route. I did however, keep the wind spline for myself as it still needed some refining at the time of the handover.

Here are the cues I also made:

 

How about the detail sounds I developed?

• Industrial estate - Busy during the day, with foxes coming to roam at night. I also implemented some weather logic so that when it's raining, you can hear vehicles driving round in the wet, rain hitting the rooves of the estare. The foxes also only come out when it's also not raining.

• Cricket / lawn bowling club - I've grouped these together as I included them inside the same sound cue, providing options to the audio designer placing the sound into the route that allow them to customise the sound to fit the place it's in. In this case, I provided an option for whether to include the sound of a lawn bowls as I'd noticed there were a few cricket clubs on the route aswell as one that included a bowls club on the same ground. The cricket and bowls schedules flow into eachother, with bowls being played in the mornings and evenings, and cricket being played through the late-morning and into the late-afternoon. The options basically just enables / disables the bowls portion. There's even a snowball fight when it snows!

• Park - Carrying over from the cricket / bowls club, I made this even more customisable! There was a huge variety of parks on this route and so I decided to provide options for if there's a playground and if there's a pond. These options can be combined or used seperately depending on the park the sound's being placed on.

• Allotments - Digging, pruning and wheel barrows. But the most elaboate part was the logic behind the lawn mowing sounds! I developed some logic that makes use of the game's time of day, month & weather systems. Someone will start mowing the grass  as long as it's summer, between 1 & 3pm and dry outside. You hear them turn the mower on and run it until it rains or reaches 3pm. In which casem you'll hear them turn the lawn mower off.

• Quarry - Taking the logic from the allotment and applying it to control digger sounds. I used my research to implement the quarry's real-life working hours. I also added in a lunch break which also turns the digger off as well as at end the end of the working day. Similar to the lawn mower, they stop the digger in the rain for some reason I'm sure's valid, you can hear the rain hitting the mud aswell as people walking around in the mud.

• Golf course - A very simple one, they play golf during between 8am & 8pm (I originally set up a day of the week system that changed the schedule to match each day correctly but some days the club is open to 11pm and I really didn't think people would play golf at 11pm). I also added in a trigger to enable some small crowd claps during the tournament season advertised by the golf club. As you can imagine, they stop playing golf in the rain and wait until it's dry again.

• Siemens rail depot - A collection of machine noise and engineers working

• Warehouse Project - I produced a short piece of music by re-instrumentalising the TSW3 theme into an electronic track.

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​I also produced a version of the TSW3 theme as an icecream van jingle that plays every now and then during the summer, around the more towny areas of the route.

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