Blog Week Two: Shots were fired.
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So this week, in preparation for our alpha presentation, I wanted to make a few sound effects. As you may or may not know, audio feedback is a big part of making a game feel right. It turns out the sounds might not be in the game for the presentation. However, I wanted to get started early on with some sounds to avoid it being a last minute addition. This week, I will focus on the rifle sound I created. I started by looking through the sound library our team got from school, but found nothing of use. Mostly cliché sci-fi noises that were way too cheesy and unfit for the style of our game. So my next step was to google rifle shot sounds that were free to use. I found that the amount of free sound effects that sound terrible, thin and have a low bitrate is quite high! Who could have guessed it. After some digging I eventually found a rapid fire shot recording of an MP5 machine gun that had a nice punch to it that i decided to use. Some modifications had to be done though. To start with, the clip was five shots long and I wanted a three shot sequence, since the in game weapon fires in three shot bursts. Also, the weapon fires plasma rounds, so I wanted to add some subtle effects to emphasize this. I loaded the file into Audacity, a free but very useful sound editor. The five shots can be seen quite easily in the waveform shown. I simply selected all of the waveform right up until the third to last shot is about to start, and deleted it.
The cut is not noticable when the sound is played. Success! On to the effects. I duplicated the track and tried some different effects built into Audacity (reverb, wah-wah, phaser) and eventually settled for phaser, to give it a sweeping sound. It sounded good, but still too much like a normal rifle and not enough like a plasma rifle. I duplicated the original track and proceeded to experiment some more with different effects, like pitch shift and some kind of vocoder filter. Running it through the vocoder filter in Audacity I managed to make a “wub wub” sort of effect, which I liked. Playing with the pitch shift, I put in some pretty extreme values to see what would happen (300% higher pitch). The result was a very stuttering, artefacted digital sound that I also liked. I now had four tracks to work with:
For track 1, I turned the volume down quite a bit, but still keeping the punchiness of the sound. Track 2 sounds very similar to track 1, but with a sweeping effect to it. It retains the punchiness of the original sound. With track 3 I needed to remove some high pitch noise. I decided to use this track to add some mid-range frequenzies. I ran the track through an equalizer removing pretty much all sound above 1khz, and below 40hz, and boosting the remaining frequenzies somewhat. This gave the sound clip some oomph and a slightly otherworldly sound. Track 4 was very loud, as can be seen in the picture above, and so the volume had to be turned way down to not overpower the other tracks. The digital, stuttering characteristic of this track gave the rifle sound a futuristic tone. Finally, I saved the project, so I can come back to it if need be, and then exported it to a .wav-file, since it does not compress the audio. I also made a one-shot sound clip, so the programmers can use either depending on how they program the sounds. This was done by just cutting the first two shots out of the clip, from all four tracks. All in all, this took me about two hours.
DifficultiesUnfortunately, WordPress will not allow me to upload sound clips. Obviously this is a big problem when wanting to show sounds. Audacity is a bit clunky, although very much usable. I will be using professional software in the future (Cubase LE8). I have done some audio editing before, not a lot, but enough for me to know pretty much what I wanted to do from the start. For someone with less experience it may take some more experimenting, but overall this should be pretty easy to achieve regardless of skill. See you next week!  |
