WEEK 4 – STARTING WITH SOUNDS
WHATDuring the forth week I was tasked with starting to make some sounds for our game. The main focus was put on creating a good sound for when the player character shoots. Other sounds I wanted to make during this sprint included:
The direction I got for the shooting sound was ”Make it sound like his inner energy”. It was pretty vague but I had an idea of what I wanted it to sound like. HOWThis was the first time I tried some sound design that was actually supposed to be used for something, and I can tell you right now, it is very hard. There is a bunch of terminology that you will not understand at all, and you will be stuck googling for a good 3 hours just getting started making a sound. I had previous ”experience” in Bfxr, making some fun sound effects for a game I made in High School, so I tried my hands on that first. I had some ideas going, for example, excuse the terminology, flowy and kind of reminiscent of the sound of a fire, but higher pitched and faster. And I had something like this going on in Bfxr, but unfortunately this program is mainly used to create very ”gamey” sound effects that sounds a lot like old arcade game sounds. This is not the style I had in mind for our sound effects, and I had to move on to something much easier, sampling. How I went about sampling was that I started googling for good sound effects I could use or manipulate to create my own. I very quickly came across some creative commons, and the unity asset store. But of course! I downloaded some samples to see if some sounded like something i use to create my own sound. When I had found some sounds that I wanted to use for the shooting sound I put them in into Audacity and started to get to work. I didn’t really have that much experience in Audacity prior to this, but my girlfriend helped out a lot, and I managed to mix two sounds together nicely to create the first iteration of our shooting sound! I then started to work on our powerup shooting sound, which is a bubble gun. This one i didn’t manipulate, but instead just took one that sounded good from a creative commons website SoundBible. This sound would be played when the player holds the left mouse button down when the character has the bubble gun. It took a lot longer to get things started and just learning how to use the programs and manipulate the sounds so that I didn’t finish all the sounds I wanted to this week. WHYWe needed the sounds in asap, and this was a bit too late to start I feel. But we needed the shooting sound for the feedback the player would receive from shooting their bullets, same with the bubble gun. As for the other sounds they are necessary in giving feedback to the player. Take the Getting Hit sound for example, ”What happened when I got hit? I heard a sound that sounded like my character got hurt, so that must have been a bad thing, right?”. Again, regarding the shooting sounds, it’s important to have very different sounds for the different weapons so that you can easily distinguish what weapon you are using, and what different effects they have.
Arvid Edström  |