RACHEL ESTELL

In the final year of university, we were required to conduct a research project spanning across the entirety of the year. With an interest in game design and the psychology behind how and why we lose our inhibitions when playing video games, I took on an ambitious project of producing three unique audio styled experiences for a duplicated walking simulator game level. The level was sourced from a Unity creator due to the project focussing on the audio implementation and not the level design.

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Procedural audio generation is regarded as a fairly new concept, with little documentation surrounding the topic areas related to the concept. As technology is always progressing, one must consider the scale of immersion experience when implementing procedural audio into a video game, as low immersion ultimately results in the player finding a game tedious and unenjoyable. Through developing a game system with three duplicated levels, bespoke, procedural and hybrid audio techniques were implemented and analysed by comparing the sense of immersion between all test levels against human participants. Overall, the findings suggest that the potential for an immersive experience when playing the procedural level is present and has the potential to reflect the results of the bespoke and hybrid levels when compared against immersion presence.