Development Highlights
Project Motor Racing (2025) - Straight4 Studios
Technical Audio Designer, Junior Audio Designer
Below are a few high-level breakdowns of features I particularly enjoyed working on
Vehicle audio setup tooling
Project Motor Racing has a large roster of vehicles, to deliver audio for each of these within memory budgets most non-engine audio elements draw from a shared library. To be able to quickly assign pre-existing content, in the case something appropriate already exists, I created an assignment tool to both author audio setups and tweak parameters and effects at runtime. This tool enabled significantly faster setup and iteration, but the largest time saving came from the ability to modify per-vehicle DSP effects to tune engine and exhaust tonalities during gameplay.
LMDh ICE / MGU Hybrid system
The systems driving motor audio for hybrid vehicles are a significant feature I owned and shipped whist working on Project Motor Racing in 2025.
Work included co-operating with the physics department to setup telemetry streams to drive audio behaviour, designing a state machine to handle vehicle “engine” states,
authoring audio unit XMLs and data structures to drive behaviour with real-time parameters and designing electric motor audio from combination of recorded and synthesised elements.
Work on this feature required rapid prototyping for proof-of-concept and iterative refactoring as both requirements and physics data pipelines evolved throughout production.
This was something I worked on fairly early on in my time at Straight4, and served as a valuable learning experience for both my technical skills and my confidence working
inter-departmentally on deliverables I was responsible for completing.
Tyre-surface blending, transitions & haptic feedback
I contributed significantly to the tyre-surface audio system, focusing on surface blending, dynamic transitions, and cross-departmental pipeline alignment.
My work centred on designing transition behaviour for loose materials like gravel, covering both subtle on/off surface entries and high-impact audio layers
for hitting raised kerbs and aggressive rumble strips.
Beyond setting up general content and behaviour data for tyre surfaces, I acted as a primary coordinator between track art and physics to ensure a unified
tagging convention for consistent physics material types across all tracks.
I also spent a significant amount of time authoring and tuning audio haptics for both gamepad and wheel inputs, as well as working alongside our audio programmer
to implement Dual-sense SDK support for PS5 haptics. These haptics aid both immersion and awareness for track boundary surfaces, wheel lock-slip-peel, and engine rev limiters.
The engine limiters were setup as a range of percussive impulse-type samples, designed to suit different engine types and ages. These assets were used as a sidechain input
for a fast attack compressor on the main engine audio bus, mixed low post-send to create that distinct staccato characteristic expected when accelerating into a hard engine rev limiter.
Gameplay programming
Most recently my efforts have been directed towards assisting the gameplay department in the run up to the 2.0 release, until present. My work consists of both frontend and gameplay features, such as setup and programming for UI, both from briefs and through collaborating on designs with our UI/UX designer. An example of a gameplay feature I shipped is the implementation of a vehicle mechanic, the articulating rear wing for the Chapparal 2F, requiring work on inputs, physics, animation and UI.
