about

Hi, I’m AJ, a Senior Sound Designer currently working at Bungie on Marathon.

I have always been amazed by games’ ability to bring people together, whether that be playing as a team in a MOBA, strategizing the next dungeon run in an MMO, or sharing moments that create emotional impact on a narrative-led journey. My goal as a sound designer and avid gamer is to enhance these immersive experiences through audio, utilizing creative artistic choices to excite and inform the player and technical execution for responsive audio in-game. 

Growing up in Dallas, TX as an avid gamer, math nerd, and regimented drummer in marching band, I became passionate about working with others to create impactful experiences with sound. My professional journey with audio began when I signed a record deal with my high school pop/punk/emo band, in which I was heavily involved in the studio and live production. We capped off a couple of busy years of touring with the summer Vans Warped Tour, where I decided to move on to Los Angeles and study music and economics at USC.

After digging further into my production and audio chops, I developed a career on live touring productions as a drummer, show designer and audio technician. As I toured throughout over 40 countries, performed on most major national TV shows, and recorded on / helped with the final engineering of a Grammy-nominated record, video games continued to provide a source of artistic inspiration and allowed me to stay in touch with friends as I traveled. To me, my lifelong passions for games and audio production always felt connected, so I finally chose to combine them to fully pursue game audio.

At Proletariat, I was able to design and implement audio assets across all areas of Spellbreak, including: UI, character spells / sorceries, skills, in-game cinematics, interactables, game modes SFX, ambience, and linear media such as trailers.

At Bungie, I have been fortunate enough to work on Destiny 2 as well as Marathon. On the Destiny 2 Systems Team, I covered design and implementation for content such as Weapons, Sandbox Abilities, UI, PVP, Combatants and assisted on seasonally themed content when needed! I oversaw all of our UI Systems and PVP Modes, which involved Feature Planning and Ownership, strengthening Cross-Discipline Communication and Rituals, Improving Pipelines, Coordinating with Outsourcers to Deliver Content, and maintaining quality across past and future releases.

Currently, on Marathon, I am owning the UI/Rewards/Loot areas while designing and implementing across various high visibility areas of the game. I am also managing two reports and coordinating across various teams to help others do their best work!

music

Projects

Especially for magic, I love starting off a project by creating tons of new source, finding new objects to record, synth patches to create, and effects chains to build. From there, the focus is to always serve the piece first and only include sounds that are believable to the characters, realistic to the world, and further the narrative and gameplay. For a full description of my design process, please click the link here.

Overwatch 2 Cinematic Trailer and Pharah Redesigns

For the Overwatch 2 redesign, I wanted to focus on synthesis. I set the objective of only using my own patches built in Serum and Massive for every synthetic Sci Fi element in the clip. I am already a huge fan of the audio in the Overwatch 2 Cinematic Trailer, so this was a really good exercise in looking to the original piece for inspiration while also putting my own spin on the sound. I had a lot of fun playing with various envelopes, LFO modulations, blending and movement of oscillators, as well as effects to create textures for Tracer, explosions/impacts, and the robot. 

For the Redesign of Pharah’s concussive blast, I started off by making my own laser tones and impacts, using filter sweeps and careful tweaking of envelopes with Reaktor Building Blocks and Serum. From there, I dropped the samples into S-Layer, using granular synthesis and the various parameters for pitch, sample start/stop, etc to create unique layers for the blast. For the weapon foley, I snuck in some samples of my car seatbelt. In this particular redesign, I also wanted to design and emphasize the odd character of the slapback delay that comes from Pharah’s weapons echoing off of the walls outside.

Additional Audio Redesigns

In this video, I walk through recording and synthesizing my own source material, implementing my audio assets through Wwise, and using basic C# and Audiokinetic components to integrate my ambiences, footsteps, and other environmental audio into the Unity 3D Game project. More videos coming soon to showcase weapons and magic audio assets in-game as well as the use of blend containers and RTPC’s for reactive audio systems.