Creating sound FX for Dragon’s Song part 1 – Lasers vs singing

By: Anders Hagström / February 26, 2015 /

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So moving into Beta I’m tasked with creating a lot of different sound FX for our game. The first thing I need to say is that while a laser sound or a gun FX might be just a second long little snippet of noise they are actually often more difficult and time consuming to produce than a soundtrack. As a musician I have years of education, experience and tools to help me perform, but when asked: ”how does a singing dragon vomiting Guile’s sonic boom sound?”, I basically start making childish noises and try to emulate them with analogue synthesizers.

Case in point: the sound of the main attack. As the game Dragon’s song features a Dragon singing I initially tried to record human voices and use them to create a laser/voice-hybrid. I spent many hours working on different vocal noises but in the end it didn’t feel like the sounds were ”violent” enough. We tried implementing some of these sounds and when pressing the fire key there was a disconnect between the expectations one has when pressing fire and the sound it produced. The dragon felt weak, not a good thing.

Another thing that changed matters was that we simplified gameplay from the pre-alpha. Originally there were three different main attacks, but after getting feedback that this was confusing we instead implemented the alternative attacks as power ups. This meant having only one main attack which naturally needed to be durable in the sense that a player had to be ok with hearing it a lot without getting annoyed. There are several examples of shooters featuring grating weapons FX design. The decision to increase the amount of power ups also meant that the main weapon had to sound powerful, but not TOO powerful. The power ups after all need to feel like they are a step up, both visually and audibly.

So in the end I went to one of my favourite synthesizers, the QuadraSID, a faithful emulation of the classic Commodore 64 sound chip. With it I created a basic ”pew pew” kind of laser noise. The attacks in Dragon’s Song are basically the player’s ability to interact with the soundtrack so the sound needed a percussive quality. It also needed to be a sound that wouldn’t make you annoyed after hearing it a hundred times while playing.

Since the dragon flies through the air it would make sense that the sound of the attack would reverberate. However most reverb effects are based on emulating the sound of various rooms and halls which wouldn’t sound right in the context of the game. What I did was use a convolution reverb, which is an echo effect produced by treating a sound with the pre-recorded impulse response of a modeled space. In this case I used the impulse response of fireworks, an actual projectile flying through the air.While this created a nice spacious effect it also created a problem in that it made the sound very large and space-hogging. I had to lower the volume and filter the lower end spectrum of the fireworks reverb to make it slot into the rest of the soundscape. This means that it’s barely noticeable on a conscious level without headphones, however it really does make a difference when listening to the sound with and without the reverb.