Bloobo

Bloobo is a high-speed physics puzzle game featuring a jiggly, subatomic protagonist. Roll along Lines, adjust Ejectors, set up Portals - and much more - to guide the Bloobos through each Test Environment. Beware of Hazards like the Blackhole and Annihilator though as they complicate your solutions.

For this project I implemented:

  • 200+ sound assets using a combination of Wwise and Unity’s Sound System
  • Multiple listener system to allow for smooth audio transitions
  • Dynamic music system
  • Optimized compression and soundbank loading system
  • Voice over system supporting voice acting and typewriter sounds

Dynamic Music

Bloobo features dynamic music written in multiple layers. A base layer always plays while playing a level. An additional layer fades in whenever a bloobo is sent to test a level. A high velocity layer fades in when testing and reacts to the bloobo’s speed; the faster the bloobo, the louder the music. Remaining inactive for a period of time fades in an idle layer. Below is a video highlighting this functionality early in production in Unity’s sound system before implementation was migrated to Wwise.

Positional Listener System

A key audio feature we wanted to implement in Bloobo was the doppler effect. Achieving this in Unity was difficult because the listener need to swapped between the Bloobo and the camera causing an audio pop. After transitioning to Wwise this process became much easier, the blackhole’s sound could be routed to the Bloobo’s listener and all other sounds could go to the camera. This also allowed us to place a slight pitch shift as well as limit the number of blackholes that were heard at once. To reduce motion sickness the orientation of the Bloobo listener was locked.

Compression and Memory Optimization

One of the largest challenges of Bloobo’s development was storage space. Early builds of the game would crash because too many sounds were being loaded into memory on startup. I worked to optimize when soundbanks were loaded and unloaded to minimize memory usage. Additionally we ran into issues with storage with builds having as much as 2GB worth of soundbanks early in development. To combat this I worked on cleaning up our soundbanks to minimize the sounds that would end up in the final build along with applying compression to reduce this amount to under 200MB.

Additional work I did on Bloobo can be found here.