This Page will examine personal findings in a blog-style layout for the work based learning module. Work based learning was a module taught in year two of university and the object of the module is to find a placment job and complete 20 days of work for them throughout the year. For which I worked at Enzien Audio. It will look at what was experienced monthly and will include specific media, dates and events that took place and what was learned about the organisation and what projects were completed.

29/09/15 - Today I was introduced into the module work based learning and all it involves. I will have to find a suitable job for at least 20 days from now until my hand in in May. Where the job is is not important however I am now searching for any sound design or game design firm that will have me. I begin to map out where i would ideally want to work. I think I would really love to work in any kind of visual programming language, like Max MSP or Pure Data as that has really interested me for a while now, I would also love to brush up on web design and other written programming languages as being an audio programming has also really interested me as a future career. Finally due to receiving a fairly average mark last year in sound design I would love to get into a better practice of how to record and edit all my own sounds for a studio or somewhere like that.

30/09/15 - I spent the first part of my day composing a cover letter that could be easily edited for each work based position I apply for. After it being approved by my tutor I began to start researching everyone I would love to work for in an ideal world, many at bristol games hub. I sent email after email to different games development companies and music production studios that specialise in foley all afternoon. I realised that I haven't really looked into anywhere that specialised in Pure Data or Max MSP. It’s obvious that I would have to travel out of Bristol to somewhere like London to get any kind of job in that category. I ended up emailing a couple of guys in London about what they do and within that list I emailed Enzien Audio. They were recommended to me by my tutor however I didn’t think anything of it as I lived so far away, however, within the hour of emailing I had my first response from them! They asked if I would send them some of my other work in Pure Data and asked for dates etc.

06/10/15 - I have kept emailing back and forth with Enzien Audio’s Martin Roth and Joe White about some of my strengths and weaknesses in Pure Data and Programming. Today I sent them all the patches I had worked on in my spare time, one of them being a step sequencer. (See image)

09/10/15 - Today Martin emailed back asking to talk to me over Skype with Joe about when we can start working together. We arranged a time for next week and hopefully we can start work soon!

14/10/15 - Spoke with Joe and Martin on FaceTime and chatted about their software heavy. Seems really awesome and hope they want to work with me. Joe asked me some questions about what I knew about Unity and designing games, unfortunately while using unity it seems I only have ever used the audio side of unity however he asked if I would do some research and design some games if I had the time.

15/10/15 - Began to so some work in unity that I had never done before. Started learning the basics in making a game.

27/10/15 - Have confirmed our first meet up in London for the 5th November, at 10am. This will mean getting the train from bristol at around 6:30am. Enzien Audio have offered to pay for my travel and lunch, which is awesome.

05/11/15 - Today I met Joe for the first time in Finsbury park at an office called Rebel Tech. It was there that I had the blunt realisation that I was a complete beginner in the world of audio programming. I learnt about Enzien’s own software call ‘heavy’ will convert Pure Data patches and generate them into a range of source code, like C or Java. Heavy will also allow integration of the patches into Wwise and Unity plugins, so therefore I will be using heavy to create audio for a Unity game. Up till now I had been working on a game in Unity, it consists of four rooms with some debris around each one and an outside world which is also going to have extras around it. The meaning of the game level has not been quite decided however getting a gun into the main camera was such a big achievement I feel it will become a shooting game very soon; shooting what, however, I am unsure of yet. After looking at the games that Joe and I had each designed, we decided to take a proper look at the software Heavy and proceeded to take a downloaded patch and add it into my game. This patch below is a simple one of mine that was made a while ago and is a buzzing sound panned from left to right to create a machine like effect. The original patch differed slightly to this one. In order to get it to correctly work in heavy, I had to create receivers to each changeable part of the patch and therefore create sliders in order to control them once the patch had been compiled. I found I learnt a lot from Joe while doing this, not only about the heavy software but also about pure data. Once the patch is compiled it can be made into a plug in that can be chosen in the audio mixer within unity. The problem with this is that it will constantly play and can not be added as a sound source quite yet. However it does work fantastically and can be edited with the sliders during game play and will work really well with sounds playing throughout gameplay. Finally, we started looking at putting in assets downloadable from the unity asset store to create a more exciting game.

12/10/15 - Did no meet this week due to illness.

19/10/15 - Due to Joe being busy this week we decided to Skype and look at some of the stuff I had been working on since then. Joe has since made the Unity wrapped in the downloadable plugin from heavy which means you can add the PD patch to a object with ease. This made it far easier for me to ass sounds to my unity game. The screen shots below show some stills from the game.

Failed to meet during this month due to my grandfather passing away early in the month and then later in the month university christmas holidays.

20/01/16 - Today was the first of our planned arranged weekly sessions. Joe and I had been messaging frequently throughout the christmas period and decided to meet again at rebel tech offices in London weekly from now till March (when Enzien head to GDC for a month). Due to all the work that had gone on in Enzien in my absence, myself and Joe decided that I could help them in a different way and start to help re-write and talk through all their documentation for them. Due to the fact I was a beginner in Pure Data and in heavy I was able to make the documentation on their website similar and easier to follow. I began making changes to it and then we agreed at the end of the day I would make some GIF’s over the next few weeks on everything accessible on the heavy website in order to make it clear to beginners how to set up an account to uploading their first patches.

27/01/16 - We met up again today and came up with a new idea. We Started to create a patch together, now this patch was not just any patch however, we has decided to call it ‘My First Patch’ and wanted to make it easy to make fir a beginner and fun to use so the user can relate more to heavy. We decided to make a siren noise as they appear a lot in the gaming world. This is what the patch looked like in Pure Data (left) and what it looks like in heavy (above). I then decided that I would work on more GIF’s for how to upload and compile that patch in heavy and then how its possible to add it to Unity. I then offered to make some tutorial videos for Enzien Audio so they could put them on websites like youtube and embed them in their own documentation for people to watch and learn from and this went down very well and we started to plan and write scripts for the videos and what content we could add to them.

10/02/16 - I am doing a lot of work outside of mine and Joe’s weekly meet ups. I find a lot of my free time is taken up making sample videos, write blog posts, writing documentation and making patches for Enzien Audio. I am currently really enjoying the position I am in and wish to continue it after the module is complete.

24/02/16 - This has been our last meeting for around a month due to Joe and the rest of the Enzien Audio team jetting off to California to the GDC games conference. Today we finalised what we wanted to do in the videos and began to add some of my documentation to the heavy website.

No meetings this month due to the team being in San Fransisco for GDC.

When Joe got back he invited me to join the teams Slack account. Slack is for business teams and allows them to share documents and talk over a web chat. I began using dropbox and slack to send joe my work on a regular basis for him to look at and give constructive feedback on. Most of what we speak about is continuing to make tutorials and videos for Enzien Audio’s software heavy however we have talked about expanding out videos to make them not only for heavy and unity but also for heavy and other software also.

Please check out enzien audio and their software heavy as it is a fantistic online software for pure data developers and game developers alike.