I also spoke to Kevin Doran, a game audio programmer and sound designer, and he gave me some fantastic feedback on my work:
‘I quite like the footstep sound, but they obviously need to be randomised a bit, and placed spatially to appear below the player.
Candles don’t make a sound, so I would take that sound out to be honest.
Definitely needs to play on the reverb, these are well designed spacious places, so as much as the character is generating sounds (i.e. through footsteps), the sounds should interact with their space as well. Walking up those stairs need nice heavy wooden thuds that reverberate all the way up the spire.
The ambience is nice, but it’s a little bass heavy. I’d reference it against other atmospheric games to get a better sense of what’s generally accepted. It feels claustrophobic in an otherwise spacious level.
Otherwise, I really like what’s going on sonically. Lots of interesting little sounds that give the place personality.
Not sure if it’s the compression hiding them, but some higher frequency sounds could be nice too. A few mice scuttlings, and wind howls of the 2k+ range.
Most churches aren’t very interesting when it comes to incidental sounds. Your best bet is to have a convolution reverb in your game and feed it plain sounds maybe. I don’t know how complex that is though, but the best thing about a church is not the sounds that happen in it, but how it changes the harmonic content of those sounds.
And I’m envious that you get to work on such a cool looking project, haha. I’m still hacking away at the boring stuff. You deserve it after all that study though.
If you can figure out the programming, you could make some really convincing spaces. I like how Fallout 4 has handled it’s sound in relation to space. Uses the doppler effect, the way sound travels over long distances with regards to wavelength, and how they handle various acoustic spaces. Of course they have a massive team, but you don’t need to model caves, and warehouses, so you might be able to narrow down to some of the core features. Just great for inspiration in any case’.