Clockwork

What happens when you give 5 game audio specialists, 0 level designers, 0 programmers, 0 producers, 0 artists, and 0... non-audio people the keys to a game engine?

Well, they'll probably spend all week working with the brand new Audio subsystem in Unreal Engine, Quartz. This system is optimized for playing sounds and triggering gameplay perfectly in sync with music. 

In Clockwork, you play as Jean-Paul Cloque, a clock whose battery life is rapidly dwindling. Collect (i.e. steal) batteries from other inanimate objects throughout the house to stay alive. As battery levels dwindle, so does the speed of the music in the background. As you might expect, collecting batteries increases the pace of the music back to normal.

While this effect is relatively straight forward to conceive, in practice every single note in the music is individually triggered by the Quartz subsystem. With over 500 individual audio files, every little bit of the background music is directly synced with your battery life. From tempo changes to arpeggiators to sequencers, we've just scratched the surface of what is possible with Quartz, and we hope you enjoy our game!