Sentient (Play Eternal)

Sentient (Play Eternal) from Michael Bartnett on Vimeo.

Sentient is an unpublished PSN/XBLA title that I worked on from April to August 2011 with the cool guys at Play Eternal. Our audio team consisted of Mike Worth and Adam Schneider working on music and sound design, with me implementing the FMOD Designer API into the Vision Engine and Scaleform.

Although Vision already had a robust audio backend, we really wanted to be able to use FMOD Designer, so I did the programming to replace Vision’s default FMOD implementation and add support for FMOD Designer in the level editor. Since we were using Scaleform for UI, I also needed to make sure that the audio encoded in our FLV cutscenes was going through our instance of FMOD. We had the opportunity to do a small writeup on our audio system on Trinigy’s blog (since Trinigy was recently bought by Havok, their developer blog post series appears to have disappeared). That was then linked to on FMOD.org.(look for the article called “Tuning In – Combining Vision with Sound 15-06-2011). I’m a huge fan of the design of FMOD’s API–it’s just so clean and conceptually clear! Suffice it to say, I was on cloud nine when I saw they had linked our humble post.