Hi everyone I am Mod Ian. I’m part of your friendly neighbourhood Audio Team, and responsible for music and sound effects in RuneScape.I have been with Jagex from the very early days and seen RuneScape grow from a small game into what it is today. I am responsible for much of the classic music, so you can blame me for those songs that get stuck in your head. As we are having a forum Month I thought I’d write a post about a typical working day for me, I hope you enjoy it!So - this week I have been putting the finishing touches on the audio for Raids. After dealing with the sound effects for the bosses, I still had the goebie area to consider. There's an awesome-looking new forest that's part of the goebies’ home world, so I set about making the atmospheric sounds to accompany the new area.I began - as I always do - just walking around the area and soaking up the atmosphere, looking at the unusual trees plants and getting a "feel" for the place. We have a great library of sounds to work from, so I set about looking for birds, beasts and insect sounds that would fit with the theme. Obviously, when dealing with any kind of alien environment you can't just rely on stock sounds, so I knew I would be doing some manipulation of the sounds I collected.Once I had collected and grouped together the source sounds I wanted, I ran most of them through a variety of processes, including varying the pitch of the calls and cries, and randomising the timbre and volumes until I had some of the qualities of sound I wanted to achieve.I thought about the size and depth of the forest and wanted some of the sounds to be close and some to be distant, you should be able to hear the calls of birds in the treetops as well as the chirp of crickets near you, so I set about using reverberation and some light echo to give a sense of space and distance.Once I had all my sounds available, I set about placing them all over the forest area using our Map Editor. we have to control how often sounds will repeat, how wide the range will be and the pitch they play back at, so this takes a fair amount of tweaking to get right. After coating the landscape with sounds, moving them around, adding more of some and removing others, the forest came to life.One of the most satisfying things is when you've spent the time putting everything together and you can just walk around and soak up the sounds you’ve created, listening to growls near you, strange birds twittering in the distance, insects scuttling or the rustle of leaves. I hope that I've captured the essence of this new area, and that you feel immersed when you visit it!Ian