6th blog post of 10 Week Project – Sounds for the Game

We did not yet have any sound in the game for the beta, and so this was one of our top priorities for the final. The required sounds for the game were all listed in our scrum document’s product backlog.

At first, we were to have different attack sounds and hit sounds for each enemy and the player, but instead we decided to have different attack and hit sounds for each elemental type. For example, the water enemy and the player will both have the same attack sound when the player is using the water element.

In our game we have two kinds of areas; the battle areas and the resting areas. The battle areas are where the player meets the waves of enemies. In the resting areas there will be an altar for the player to regain the access of lost elements, and in these areas the player will be able to focus on the background art and sounds. The background sounds are sounds of the waling wind and the player’s footsteps, and the volume of these will increase when the player enters the resting areas.

Finding a sound for the footsteps wasn’t too hard. I just had to make sure that it fit with the environment of the game, for example we would not use the sound of a pair of high heels walking on a wooden floor, and also that the rhythm of the footsteps was in pace with the animated sprite of the walking player. A sound of someone walking on grass was picked, and I then used Audacity to change the rhythm of the steps.

Audacity is a free open source digital audio editor, and it was perfect for editing the sounds for our game. It was easy to delete parts of the sound files and I also changed the pitch of several sounds. As we are only able to use .wav files, this program was used to export them as the correct file type.

The majority of sounds that we picked I found on a hard drive that was borrowed from school. However, there are still some required sounds missing. I have been searching on the web for royalty free sound effects, but it’s pretty difficult to find the right sounds. A fitting sound of the wailing wind is difficult to find. The ones that I have found was either low quality or else the wind was too strong. There are also sounds missing for our water element, as most sound effects of water are people dropping things into bathtubs and they would not work for a spirit shooting water projectiles.

Here is an example of a crunching sound that is played when eating a lost soul in our game: