I was one of the original developers on open world survival game The Isle, starting in late 2015. For almost five years I was solely responsible for the game’s audio, and was involved in many other creative aspects along the way.

Alongside designing prehistoric ambiences and a wide array of foosteps, my biggest task was creating all of the creature vocals. This entailed a range of calls for different emotional states (alarmed, friendly, threatening, etc.) across a variety of species.

Over time, the playable roster grew from a mere handful of dinos to over 30 different animals ranging from the diminutive to the gargantuan, made all the more complex by the addition of both juvenile and subadult variants that were needed later.

In order to support the changing vocal vibe from hatchling to adult, I created a series of intricate curves that controlled crossfades and pitch shifters that would be dynamically adjusted based on the animal’s current growth stage. These smoothly blended between at least three distinct sound sets for each animal, giving a fairly natural feeling of becoming deeper as they grew older. Simply modifying one audio file for the entirety of an animal’s life cycle would not have been convincing, but the variants needed to have near-identical timings to support a more seamless blend from young to old.

Being an open world game also neccessitated the creation of different sound processes and techniques to cover such vast areas, with special distant and extra-far versions of roars to be heard from miles away. With very large areas to get lost in, and a focus for the game on realism, sound would play an important part in being able to both find friends and prey by following their calls.

The forest / jungle ambience was adjusted depending on the player’s location or current time of day and weather conditions, with a cavalcade of sound submixes employed to create a highly reactive sound environment. Elements like the roar of a T.Rex would drown out any other sounds close to it, and heavy rain storms made the island’s insects and birds go into hiding.

It was an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience to lend voice to such a range of ancient beasts, and make the world of The Isle feel truly alive.

During my time on the project I have also assisted in level design and art asset creation for the game’s expansive maps. This involved figuring out the overall layout of major landmarks and connective arteries in the maps such as large rivers, sculpting the landscape, and a lot of hand-placed points of interest that hint at a larger story waiting to be uncovered.

I also had the joy of creating various visual effects to help sell the believability of the dinosaurs. This included aspects such as dripping blood from their mouths when feeding on a kill, huge dust clouds when swinging their tails around, making deep footprints that are left in their wake, making reactive water splashes when swimming and having their skin appear realistically wet.

Taking on a tech artist role, I both created new shaders and expanded on the master dino shader originally set up by John Van Sise, adding more features and optimizing wherever possible. Instead of doing bone animation for dinosaur blinking, I created a simple flipbook texture barely 64 pixels in size that gave the illusion of a nictitating eyelid closing. Alternating two different sequences gave the effect of random blinks.

With the assistance of artist Fred Wierum I helped design a series of fact file sheets on the various dinosaurs that were being added to the game, creating the layout and text to go with Fred’s beautiful drawings. Each piece hinted at various game mechanics the new species had while also playing into the fiction of the world.

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It was fun to work on these, but to my knowledge they never ended up being used officially outside of a few announcement posts.

We ended up creating an alternative “character sheet” in a more electronic style within the game’s own menus, which would track the stats of your dino and display a few of the same details. Aside from a couple of extra buttons, the design that’s in the current game is largely the same today, featuring animated elements I created such as the radar background and heart monitor that changes colour based on health…

Working in UMG I developed a range of complex motion graphics such as these. I designed effects for the user interface, helping establish & implement styles for the menus and HUD, plus spearheaded a lot of minor enhancements such as displaying local time on the main menu and adding a flatline graphic to the death screen (which itself had even more lore elements concealed within it).

Various ARG-like pieces were put out to the game’s community and I assisted the game director in creating hidden messages for players to find, burying them in a range of obscure places such as the lights on the main menu which blink in morse code sequence.

My video production skills were also put to use in not just making CCTV loops for the main menu, but in crafting several official trailers. Scenes were staged in UE4’s Sequencer tool with extra visual effects applied in AfterFX.

I also managed the official YouTube channel and created the game’s Steam page, all of which featured subtle hints at in-universe mysteries.

Although it was stimulating work, the project seemed to have no end in sight. After five years in development and essentially a reboot in the middle, I was too burned out to continue and left the team in 2020. 

The game remains in early access to this day.

Official Website here:     http://findtheisle.com/

The Isle on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/376210/The_Isle/

Trailer I created for The Isle’s rebooted version, featuring a few dinos that are still not in the game and a map I was heavily involved in designing and detailing…