Eduardo Pesole’s top 10 tips for Wwise and Unreal Engine 5

Music Hackspace tutor Eduardo Pesole is a Berlin-based sound designer, sound artist and composer He is a graduate in Sound Design from IED – Istituto Europeo di Design, Rome and his clients include Point Blank Games, 505 Games and Oneoone Games. As the course leader for our new Certified Courses program Master Game Audio with Wwise and Unreal Engine 5 we asked him to share his top 10 tips for Dolby Atmos mixing. 

1. Organize your hierarchy structure: A well-organized project is the key! Build a solid hierarchy structure using a proper naming convention for your files into the project, categorize sounds with names and color coding, that would help you to easily navigate into the project and quickly find what you need.

2. Reach out to a community to ask for help: Game sound designers have a nice community of people who help each other solve problems, give advice, share knowledge, etc… In my personal experience, it has always been a great resource for problem-solving and inspiration. here are some link ( For Italian speakers: https://discord.gg/ZZdDuCjY;  For internationals: https://www.facebook.com/share/NRFdhVMcp68HFXZx/ ;  https://www.airwiggles.com/c/general?post_login_redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.airwiggles.com%2F )

3. Read the Audiokinetic blog and watch their Twitch channel: These 2 are other powerful resources, they’re full of articles and videos of professionals sharing their projects, workflows and tricks. There is a lot to learn from them.

4. Mind your soundbanks: If you’re working with soundbanks in Wwise you don’t want to mess them up! Soundbanks that are too heavy will take more time to be loaded from the game engine. Dividing them into categories, and loading and unloading them when required will substantially improve the performance.

5. Randomize assets: randomization is a great friend, randomize pitch, volume, triggering time of a sound, and everything you need to make the game sound as natural as possible enhancing immersivity.

6. Recycle your assets: Recycling your assets is a good way to save resources and time. sometimes you can just change pitch, add some in-engine effects, play with filters to make footsteps sound bigger or smaller for example and use them for different creatures in the game.

7. Use Multiposition: Another way to improve performance is using multiposition emitters, which allows you to place a sound effect in different positions on the map (for example lakes, torches, waterfalls) as many times as you want without using too many resources it will always count only as 1 physical voice playing.

8. Use convolution: Reverbs are essential to the immersiveness of a game, and the best thing is to use convolution reverbs to recreate the acoustics of a space.

9. Use built-in game syncs: Built-in game syncs can be very useful to drive real-time parameters for the 3D spatialization of game objects, enhancing the mix and immersivity of the game.

Be creative: Last but not least, creativity. Be creative while designing your systems, think out of the box, and explore the thousands of possibilities that these tools are offering you. Don’t be afraid to try and experiment while researching.