Alejandro Hervella’s Aliens After Ava (2023)—Audio Engineering, Sound Design
This game is a runner-style action game created by Alejandro Hervella and has been recently released on Steam. In the game you play as a girl running through a forest full of alien monsters with some weapons and dodging tactics as your only defenses. Alejandro and I presented the game at Super MAGFest 2023’s MIVS showcase.
This was a fantastic project to work on and I had a blast coding and developing for it. My work on this was primarily when Alejandro and I were preparing for development of Lunarnaut back in 2021, but we made many foundational decisions for how we would set up our SFX systems and it was much more in-depth to make something complex without the use of existing scripts or middleware like Wwise.
The sound design work I really enjoyed and I always enjoy working in sci-fi and creature sounds. For the aliens I did a lot of original recordings and experiments with different processing options, and particularly for the character movement sounds I spent a lot of time editing foley and working in our custom system to make each movement sounds a bit different every time and I ‘m very happy with the results. I hope to work on some new music tracks for it in future updates, but for now I’m very happy with it!
Garden Tails: Match and Grow (2022)—Audio Engineering, Sound Design
Garden Tails is a Match 3-style game in which the player collects different animal friends and plants to populate different style of gardens.
This project was a big job for me at Dots as I was brought on when there was much work to be done on the audio engineering end which was left for me to do on my own. Working along with the fantastic development team there, I worked to revitalize and flesh out the bones that were there in order to make a very well-organized and effective audio and music system that brought the game’s character together especially in the garden scenes.
Unlike the Match-3 elements which were mostly complete by the time I came on, the garden scenes were an open canvas which I worked to fill in with a very relaxing and detailed soundscape. In it, there many environmental sound effects and detailed movement and vocalization sounds from each animal the player encounters which helps to bring the gardens to life as the player advances in their game. Additionally, I developed a mixing system which helps bring the detail of the animal and environment sounds up when the player zooms in to look closely at the animals, which brings a very ASMR-like effect to the very cozy and relaxing environments.
All together I think it was a really great project and I appreciate the broader scope my work was given in this project during its development, and I’m very happy to see it released.
TwoDots—Audio Engineering, Sound Design
This award-winning mobile game features a wide variety of sound effects and music across several kinds of gameplay. For this game, I primarily worked with the Audio Leads to refine and optimize their audio implementation systems under the hood, developing new audio systems and features for music and sound effects.
This was a super rewarding time for my work and I think I was able to get deep into developing a lot of skills in Unity, working in very large team environments, and developing/adapting live games.
Parrot Games SL’s Match In Paris (2022)—Sound Design
During my time at Dots, I developed most of the sound effects for this mobile game developed by Parrot Games SL. You play as Emma, who recently won a hotel in Paris and plays through matching games to unlock repairs and upgrades for the building while following storylines including romance and old secrets of the property.
Working on this project at Dots was very rewarding and it was one of my first projects with the company where I got a lot of creative freedom and did extensive sound design on my own. I primarily made UI sound effects and sounds for the match-3 game in which I focused on mixing and sound selection for the very bright and cheerful aesthetic. Making sounds like explosions sound cheerful was an interesting and unusual task and I had a blast hearing all of my sounds in the final product.
This game has been removed from the App Store it seems? After my time, but was still a great project ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Alejandro Hervella’s Lunarnaut (In Development)—Audio Engineering, Sound Design
This game is a side-scrolling horror puzzle game created by Alejandro Hervella currently in development. Though most assets in the build attached above are developer placeholders, I am working to create sound effects and music for the game as well as work with him on audio implementation using Wwise in Unity.
Nina Demirjian’s Red Planet Farming (2020)—Score
Red Planet Farming is a resource management game created by recent NYU graduate Nina Demirjian with collaboration with artist Sean Park and myself, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and advisement from scientists at NASA.
For this game, I composed music and created most of the sound effects used in the UI and menus. We wanted to create a very relaxing atmosphere for the game to pair with the visuals, and I sought to support this with satisfying, soft and pleasant sound design as well as relaxing music which follows the evolution of each Martian colony through layers being added as the population grows.
This game was released on Steam on May 25, 2020 and has received a Very Positive rating on the store.
Sean Porio's Media Portfolio 