Game Design 2 – Sound design of the GUI (Team Leviathan)

Author : Arnaud Mimoun

  The assets that I am going to review this week are the 3 sounds of our Menu.

• There a sound for when you are pressing a button of the menu 
• One for when you are going back on the menu 
• And finally one for when you launch the game 

   I as Producer, Project Manager and Sound Designer of our game was charged to build the sounds of our game. Just like all the sounds in our game, I decided at first to get random sounds from flash developer resources sites. These site are “Soundfx” and « SoundBible », they are full of various sounds free to be used by everyone and therefore a great source to make my database.

  Once gathering a certain quantities of different sounds I used a sound editor/creator, here fruity loops studio 12. With this software I modified the sounds I’ve collected, mix them together, edit the result once again to get something even more exotic and so one. This is the first time in my whole life that I worked at making sounds or any kind of music so It is a lot of experimenting and was way much time consuming than I would expect. I could take shortcut and simply add the sounds I’ve collected without modifying them but I think I will get more experience from creating original ones.

  When I made the sound for the menu I wasn’t sure at first of what I wanted to make so I first collected sounds that I had a good feeling from. Once I had a database of 10 different sounds I sorted out 7 of them and decided to work with it. After listening to all these sample I was more sure about what I wanted to create and therefore my idea was to make a menu sound design that would appeal to our targeted audience.

  Following this idea I created at first a very “Arcade” kind of sound for when you click on the different options of the menu. I wanted the player from our targeted audience whom are not regular players to feel like they were back into these arcade games of their youth right from the menu. Therefore I made a simple yet very “game-feeling” sound for when you click.

  Once I was satisfied with what I created, I decided to also make a sound for when you go back in the menu. Nothing was more simple as I choosed to take the original sound I had and play backward to see how it would sound like, and that was exactly what I wanted. The sound play when you do the opposite of clicking a menu (going back) and you can get that just from what you hear, the feeling I wanted for it was here.

  Finally I decided to make an original sound for when you actually launch the game and press the button for it. The idea was to tell the player that the real experience start now from the moment they clicked that play button. To give that feeling to the player I decided to make a longer sound and in it I added at the end this high pitch note that kind of remind of when you used to start a game boy. The little high pitch ending noticing you that you were in.

  Another reason for me to design this sound in a longer format was the way the game start when you press play. The background of the menu will actually be the background of the game and when you will start, the menu will fade away and you’ll be right away in the game wandering in space. Making a sound that would last the time that the menu start to fade away was then necessary to give a feeling of transition.

About Mimoun Arnaud

2016 Project Management

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