About me
Hi, I’m Rene from Dortmund, Germany and I found my passion in working with sound. Especially in creating sound for games, be it from a wide range of recordings or synthesizers.
Education
I started off as a roady after finishing school in 2015 and found myself at the SAE Bochum in September 2017. Looking to get the necessary education, to become a fully-fledged audio engineer for concerts. But being a gamer for all my life, I quickly found myself hanging out with the game artists and programmers located at the SAE. This led to me creating a battering ram for a Minecraft mod in October 2017 (which turned out awfully) but got me hooked on sound design and game audio. I quickly found a “partner in crime” in form of a games programmer, to explore Audiocinetic’s Wwise for game audio integration and was taught my first steps in C# and Unity.
I finished my audio engineering diploma in April 2019, with the recording, mixing, and mastering of a mathcore band based in Bochum.
Just before finishing my diploma, the artists and programmers, I worked with before, and I started to work on the concept for “Insectoid Warrior Za’Kaal”, an ARPG set on an alien planet, where the player should progress through killing and devouring enemies, thereby acquiring the enemy specific skills or perks.
Starting off officially in April, as a project encompassing three bachelor theses and for 10 members as the main part of a secondary module.
My goal was to create a soundscape, that communicated and interacted on different auditive layers with the player. Based on Björn Jacobsen’s “informant diegetic”, I was looking to recreate parts of his theory in practice. Sadly failing because of internal development issues that led to the enemy AI missing and thereby leading to no possibility of testing my designed and implemented enemy SFX in the field.
Nevertheless, I managed to turn my thesis around and reshift the focus on auditive environment building and graduated in October 2019 in Audio Production, with a final grade of 2.1. As a treat from our lecturer for indie game marketing, we were invited to the Games Com and still had a good time pitching a game lacking enemies.
Professional Career
I started my work as an audio engineer in 2018, working mostly at venues around cologne and roughly for half a year at the “Musiktheater im Revier” (theater) in Gelsenkirchen.
Slowly shifting my work to sound design and mixing, I earned my living at the weekends by mixing and running concerts, whilst building up my game portfolio. Sadly I got thrown off my tracks as Covid 19 hit the world and ended live music in Germany as for now. As my slow shift became a sudden one, I fully focussed on finishing the transformation of my business to sound design, editing, and mixing. Finally releasing my first sound libraries “Metal gears cast iron” and “grinding gears and mechanisms” in February 2021 on “A sound effect”, “Unreal Marketplace”, and “Game Dev Market”.
