Blog #4: Making a sound from scratch
|
Hi! I’m Léo, Scrum Master and sound dude of team Wendigo. In today’s blogpost, I will discuss how I made the sound of the enemy squid shooting. In our game, “Umibōzu”, the squid is an enemy that shoots ink projectiles. Like all enemies, obstacles, and power ups in the game, when the squid is in the darkness, it is only visible as a silhouette to the player.  Only when the fishing boat’s spotlight is shone on a silhouette is the true nature of that silhouette revealed to the player.  When observing students playtest our game, it was obvious that the squid was overpowered. Since he made his first appearance in the second level, players were taking aback by a silhouette that suddenly started firing projectiles at them. The ink travelled quickly and aimed at the player’s latest position, making it extremely difficult to dodge given the avatar’s slow, sluggish movement. The projectile’s behavior was easily adjustable in the code but we also wanted to give an audio cue to the player letting them know they are being shot at. I was tasked with creating the sound of the squid firing his ink projectile. I recorded some sounds I made with my mouth which became the base sound for the clip. The first noise you hear in the clip is the one I decided to use. I imported it into the music software program Ableton Live 10 for editing. I added some reverb to add space and depth to the sound. The sound felt too bland so I decided to use a simple technique called layering. In sound design, layering is when you combine multiple sounds to make one. I wanted to add more impact and variety to the clip so I recorded the sound of my finger flicking a bottle cap. My idea was to adjust the frequency of the bottle cap flick in order to have one low and one high pitched sound. Both sounds are intended to add more power to the shot on the high and low end of the tone. Also, having a variety of pitches in a clip is oftentimes a nice and easy way to contribute to the overall complexity and richness of a sound. I also added reverb to make the sound less “tappy” and more vague.  My designer provided me with feedback, suggesting to make the current iteration of the sound more “slimy” sounding. The shaking of my water bottle is what I used to add that effect. I used two of the shakes you can hear in the clip and combined them to make it longer. As usual, I added reverb for depth, vagueness, and space. Here, you can listen to all the sounds individually and combined after editing. Overall, I am satisfied with the result of the sound and had a lot of fun during the process. Thank you for reading and see you next week! ∼ thedudeleo  |