Star Wars Outlaws

For most of 2024 I was part of the Ubisoft Shanghai team for Star Wars Outlaws, contributing to the game’s wildlife audio from the smallest lizards to the legendary Krayt Dragon. Developed by Massive Entertainment with support from Ubisoft studios worldwide, the game immerses players in a scoundrel fantasy across iconic and new planets like Toshara.

Optimizing Particle-Based Wildlife

One of my key technical contributions was designing a system to optimize emitter count and polyphony for particle-based wildlife, used for insects, rats, birds, and lizards that often appear in large numbers. The system monitors particles in the game world and ranks them by priority based on behavior, speed, and visibility from the camera. It then positions a limited number of audio emitters on the most relevant particles, ensuring efficient performance without sacrificing the immersive soundscape of a living Star Wars ecosystem.

The Krayt Dragon

On the design side, I was tasked with the Krayt Dragon, a massive creature requiring exotic audio for its underground locomotion and dive attacks. The goal was to make this legendary beast feel as enormous and terrifying as it should, with audio that matched its on-screen presence.

Tech mandate

Besides these specific mandates and generic technical support tasks, I was also in charge of setting up and maintaining the wildlife Wwise hierarchy, including routings and positionings, to be both intuitive for audio designers and robust in terms of enforcing the correct settings for each sound. The structure ensured that assigning the right spatialization, routing, and playback behaviors was straightforward and reliable across the game’s diverse creature roster.