The task of navigating and orienting oneself in an unknown environment might seem arbitrary to most people. For a person with a visual impairment however, it can prove to be a challenge. Much research has been conducted to provide useful software solutions to aid this problem. Nevertheless, not enough research has been put into studying the use of our everyday sounds for such software. The present thesis is aimed at evaluating the usefulness of utilising diegetic spatial audio. After a real environment was replicated in a virtual audio environment without visual input, 16 sound students from the University of Skövde were asked to perform the same set of tasks in the virtual and the real environment. The results indicated that diegetic spatial audio is an important part of navigating without vision and that the experiment would be interesting to perform on a larger scale with visually impaired participants.

Religion is a broad topic and serves as a great foundation for narratives in severallarge game titles. In this study we investigate how to create game assets with a religiousconnotation to build the feeling of an existing religion within the game. Using our previousproject, Martyr of Carnage (Studio F15, 2024), as a foundation, our goal is to have playersperceive a religion without a clear association to any real-world belief systems. To achievethis, we mainly investigated semiology, ritual theory, diegetic sound, and symbolism andiconography. During the iterative design process of our three prototypes, each tested by acontrol and randomised group of play testers, we focussed on asset creation, visual andauditory communication, and narratively valuable mechanics, while staying within theboundaries of non-verbal communication. We conducted surveys and interviews incombination with playtesting for data gathering. As a result, we found the importance ofconsidering immersion, contextualization and white space when attempting a study of thiskind.