Shaun Farley, the same who run the monthly sound design challenge on his blog, has announced a new game audio challenge which will be held during April. Here’s what Shaun said:

I’ve been working with Damian Kastbauer and Jeff Seamster to develop a video game oriented challenge that ABSOLUTELY anyone can participate in, regardless of your experience (or lack thereof) in that particular medium. We’ve come up with a good one…at least, we think it is…and it’s going to be next month’s challenge. I’m dishing this information out now, so that you’ve got some time to prepare if you’ve never worked with the tools before.

For April’s challenge, we’re going to be working with Wwise. You can download it for free from Audiokinetic’s site, all you have to do is enter some contact information. The Wwise sample project that you can download from the site is excellent, but might be a little large and overwhelming for what you need to do in order to prepare for this particular challenge.

To simplify things for you a bit, we’ve got a sample template (along with some sound effects) that’s very similar to the template that will go out for next month’s challenge. You can all thank Richie Nieto for the example template. It’s built on a much smaller scale, but still offers a nice glimpse into the workings of audio for games. Please note this template and the sound effects contained within are for educational purposes only, and may not be redistributed in any way. I’ve included a set of instructions on how to get all the components into a Wwise project, as well as some suggestions of topics/techniques to explore for the challenge. The pack will be available from this page until April’s Challenge starts on the 21st.