Xan Williams Sound Design Portfolio (WIP)

Hi, welcome to my portfolio website. As you can see, it's very much a work in progress. I'm not as prepared to show off my work as I'd like to be right now. In lieu of a properly edited, up to date show reel, I've compiled a list of links to sections of YouTube videos that show work I was primarily responsible for. I've attempted to provide notes to clarify what parts were my contributions.

Ravenbound Announce Trailer

My most recent released project was Ravenbound. I spent the first half of the project in a primarily sound design focused role working on characters, magic and the odd prop. For the second half of the project I switched to mostly tech tasks, including setup the game's music system using our state system to control Wwise's music logic.

This was the announce trailer for the game. I'm including it here as I did the final pre-rendered sequence of the trailer (starting with the scream at about 1:16).

ADC Presentation (runtime ~60mins)

Here's a presentation I did with Dominic Vega for the 2021 Audio Developer's conference on the state-based adaptive music system that I developed with Niclas Frohagen (Audio Programmer). The talk covers quite broad concepts and was intended to be digestible to people unfamiliar with adaptive music in games. A lot of the concepts are probably very recognisable to people who work in this area.

The demos of in-game content are quite basic but might be better content to jump to if you're trying to find a section to quickly watch. They are at 4:40 and 12:20

We're demoing this in the Second Extinction project, though most of the core work was completed on Rage 2. An extra aside that's not really displayed in the video is that the version used on Second Extinction was scaled down, and reworked to allow sound designers on the project to extend the system with new music and new enemy types themselves, without the need for technical support (me).

Rage 2 DLC - Abadon Warlock Boss Fight (Cult of the Death God)

After the release of Rage 2, I stayed on the project for a few more months, switching to sound design work for the bonus mission pre-order content and the two DLC releases. This is the two headed "Warlock" boss for one of the bonus missions. A fairly small animation set, mostly waving his traffic light staff and charging the player. The fight in this video lasts a looooong while.

theHunter: Classic - Whiterime Ridge Polar Bear

After Mad Max I did a stint on theHunter (now called theHunter: Classic), doing a few expansions. The largest kind are reserves. Whiterime Ridge is set in Alaska. I did all the ambience, a new breathing system to communicate a hypothermia mechanic, new weapons (including some bows) and a few animals.

The biggest two animals were a bison and a polar bear - the first animal to hunt the player. I could find good real life source for quite a lot of the content, save the polar bear. I learned that (at the time) there were famously zero audio recordings of them in the wild. They shy away from human equipment, and most of the footage available (the kind used in nature documentaries) are taken over huge distances. The only library samples that purport to polar bears from zoos are drenched in reverb. Thus most of it's Foley is me beating up my old sheepskin coat and it's vocals are other bear samples, processed to try to mimic the zoo recordings.