Not Today, Darling!
Solo audio on a 5-person team. 11 weeks. I learned more about working with people than about sound.
Grannies on Go-Karts
I thought this would be about making a game. It turned out to be about working with people.
Not Today, Darling! is a chaotic 4-player side-scrolling racer where grannies smash their way to victory on go-karts. We had 11 weeks and total creative freedom - everyone pitched ideas on a whiteboard, we circled what excited us, and built from there. I was the only audio person, handling everything from the procedural engine sound to the final mix.
This was my first time working with animators, developers, and artists on something real. There were arguments. Conflicts of interest. People wanting different things. Before this, nobody at DAE had ever questioned my work - suddenly everything was up for debate. It sucked at first, but I got it. I learned how collaboration actually works: you fight, you compromise, and you can't miss a deadline because four other people are waiting on your stuff.
At the very end, I recorded everyone from the team doing granny voices - reactions to collisions, power-ups, overtakes. Pick a character color and you're hearing one of us. A little keepsake from a project that taught me more than any class did. It was about learning to finish something as a group. And it's the reason I was ready for Shadow Frames.
Yes, those are real granny voices. Yes, they're us.
What I Built
Procedural Go-Kart Engine
My first serious MetaSounds project. RPM, throttle, and load drive the engine sound in real-time - no baked loops. The whole thing responds to player input frame by frame. I was learning MetaSounds as I went, so the graph wasn't pretty, but close your eyes and you know when the kart is accelerating, braking, or sliding. That's what matters.
Stopping 4 Players from Sounding Like a Mess
4 players means 4 engines, 4 sets of power-ups, collisions, and granny screams all at once. Without structure, it was noise. I built a Sound Class hierarchy where your own kart always sits on top. Distant karts get attenuated and ducked. Power-ups and collisions run through concurrency limits - only the most relevant ones actually play. First time managing a mix this dense. It worked.
Team Voices as Granny Characters
Last week of the project. I set up a mic and recorded every team member doing their best angry granny - reactions to getting hit, picking up power-ups, overtaking someone. Each character color is a different person from the team. Randomized Sound Cues with cooldown timers so they don't repeat. Pick the red granny and that's our programmer yelling at you.
Under the Hood
MetaSounds Pickup System
Sound Class Hierarchy
What Went Wrong & How I Fixed It
"I Can't Hear My Own Kart"
What Was HardFirst playtest with all 4 players: total chaos. 4 engines, power-ups firing, collisions, granny screams. Nobody could tell what was happening to their own kart. The audio was just mush. I'd never mixed anything with this many simultaneous sources before.
What I DidBuilt the Sound Class hierarchy described above, but the real lesson was figuring out the priority order. First attempt: equal priority for all karts. Disaster. Second attempt: your kart at max, others at half. Better, but power-ups still drowned everything out. Final version: three priority tiers with concurrency limits per tier. After the fix, nobody mentioned audio anymore. They were too busy arguing about who rammed who. Good sign.
Making a Synth Engine Not Sound Like a Synth
What Was HardI'd never touched MetaSounds before this project. Procedural engine sound is tricky - it can easily sound like a vacuum cleaner instead of a go-kart. The engine had to respond instantly to throttle changes and feel like it's actually powering something with wheels.
What I DidThe parameter mapping was straightforward. The hard part was pitch smoothing - without it, sudden throttle changes made the engine jump between frequencies like a broken synthesizer. I added interpolation so the pitch ramps up and down instead of snapping. Small change, big difference. Not perfect, but it sounds like a go-kart instead of a broken synthesizer.