James Zolyak
Music and Technical Audio Designer
Music Editorial Reel
Technical Audio Reel
Bio
Welcome to my little piece of the internet! I am James Zolyak and I am a sound designer. I have my B.S. in Game Design in Development from the Rochester institute of Technology and my M.S. in Games and Playable Media from the University of California: Santa Cruz.
When I’m not working you can usually find me cooking, enjoying a nice cup of tea, or squeezing in some time to stream on Twitch.
Main Skills: Music Editing, Sound Design, Audio Implementation, Audio Mixing, Music Composition, Programming, Foley Recording, AGILE/Scrum, Waterfall
Games I'm Playing: Genshin Impact, Monster Hunter: World, Pokemon Leaf Green Challenges, Warhammer: Vermintide 2
Production
Released titles you can find my work in
Older Work
Dash Quasar
My capstone for grad school, this was a game made with a 7 person team using Unity with audio implementation in FMOD. A mix of inspirations coming from 8 bit era games merged with realistic sounds this was a showcase for my skills showing off my abilities to create Spatialized Audio with regards to Voice Overs and Dynamic Music. Along with that I have been responsible for assisting with VO Direction and recording as well as handling contracts with our musician and voice actors. Dash Quasar was also nominated for Best Student Game at The Game Awards 2018. You can download and play the game here: Dash Quasar
Hack, Slash & Backstab
For this game I took over as the Lead Sound Designer. I created the audio direction for the game and then made all of the sound effects and music to match. For the sound effects, I recorded all the foley for the game and then handled all the mixing/mastering in REAPER. The music was all composed by myself and recorded in Reaper. I handled all mixing and mastering of the music as well. After generating the audio for HSB I was also responsible for implementing all of it within the game. Hack, Slash & Backstab was published by MAGIC Spell Studios and can be found on Steam, Humble Store and Xbox Live Store. You can find out more about the game, find out about the other team members or purchase it directly here as well: Hack, Slash & Backstab
Enter the Forest Temple
This was a small sound design challenge I gave myself after seeing the animation on Reddit. Hopefully I was able to do the games a bit of justice. All music used in this video belongs to Nintendo and the animation belongs to Reddit user /u/Txikimorin
Procedural Terrain Oscillators
This began as a project to let myself work on learning Pure Data but I combined it with a class project for a bit of interactivity. The original wavetable synth is written in Pure Data then converted to Unity C# through the use of Heavy. Afterwards I grab the converted C# synth code and make alterations to things like the Coarse Frequency and CV Freq In based on the location data of a first person character.
Cooking Daddy
For this project I handled all of the audio design and implementation. All audio is implemented in FMOD with procedural music using of transitions with weighting based around a standard chord progression. I also handled the implementation of object pooling and a large amount of the game design. Lastly I was also responsible for managing the teams Trello Board.