2025 · Four-player couch racing

Not Today, Darling!

A couch racing game for up to four players. As sole audio designer, I built the MetaSounds engines and mixed the collisions, power-ups and voices for one shared screen.

Six-person student team · Unreal Engine 5 · MetaSounds · Blueprints · REAPER

Play on itch.io Trailer

Karts racing over a cardboard course in a living room, with player portraits in the corners of the screen

Grannies race through a course built from household objects.

Engine sound driven by each kart

Every kart has its own engine sound, controlled by speed, throttle and load. I smoothed fast control changes so the pitch follows the kart without jumping abruptly.

The trailer, with the final engines, power-ups, collisions, voices and mix.

Making a pile-up readable

The first mix gave every engine and effect the same priority, so pile-ups became unreadable. I split the sounds into three priority tiers and added concurrency limits: kart feedback, major crashes and pickups stay audible, and distant engines and less important sounds yield first.

Sound Class priority hierarchy

Sound Classes

The three priority tiers

Kart feedback, major crashes and pickups take priority in a crowded mix.

MetaSounds pickup graph

MetaSounds

Pickup playback

A shared MetaSounds graph handles the pickup sounds.

Shared attenuation presets

Attenuation

Shared distance settings

The sources in the world share a small set of presets, so distance behaves the same way whichever sound is playing.

Character voices performed by the team

In the final week I recorded the team performing the character voices. The game varies the recordings and leaves time between reactions to limit repetition.

The team’s final devlog covers the voice work and the finished game.

A granny on a green mobility scooter, her name spelled in Scrabble tiles beside her and her drawn portrait in a circle

A character introduction from the trailer.