Audio breathes life into your visuals, making games immersive and emotionally impactful. On Day 18, you’ll learn how Unreal Engine handles sound through its audio engine, including Sound Cues and the advanced MetaSounds system.

Start with importing sound files and placing ambient sounds, such as birdsong, wind, or machinery, into your levels. You’ll explore Sound Cues, a powerful node-based system for creating audio logic like randomization, looping, and audio blending. For example, create a cue that plays a random footstep sound when walking, or blends ambient layers based on proximity.

Next, dive into MetaSounds, Unreal’s answer to procedural and reactive audio. You’ll build a MetaSound that responds to player movement or health, offering real-time variation and enhancing gameplay feedback.

You’ll also learn how to trigger sounds through Blueprints—such as playing a door creak when a player approaches, or starting a background track at level start. We’ll touch on audio attenuation, reverb zones, and occlusion settings for realism—like muffled sounds behind walls or louder effects when up close.

Finally, we’ll cover music layering techniques—fading in combat music, transitioning between themes, or syncing audio to animations and cutscenes.

By the end of this session, you’ll have implemented immersive sound design and set up systems for interactive and dynamic audio—an often-overlooked feature that dramatically elevates the player experience.