Pumpmeter increase & “Blue Cow” power-up SFX

All the sound effects I’ve done so far has been pretty straight forward, although our game has a very distinct cartoonish feel to it I decided I would keep all “real” sounds simple and realistic. The sounds of feet hitting concrete or a cane striking another human being should be as similar to the real sound as possible because I wanted to keep our game from becoming too surreal. When it was time for me to produce sounds for things like an increase in our “pumpmeter” and various sounds for when picking up power-ups no particular sound came to mind and I decided that even though I wanted keep all sound effects fairly real I found no alternative to the standard cartoony sounds that you usually hear in space shooters, the sort of sci-fi inspired sounds that make you think of aliens and spaceships.

I realized that the sound I was looking for was going to have to be something that conveyed the feeling of something increasing, a “rising” sound with a climax in both pitch and velocity. The best description of the sound I can think of is if you can picture a bubble of air traveling up towards the surface in a lake. When I had constructed such a sound using several separate sounds that I modulated using various effects such as something called flanger and pitch – correct, I was pretty satisfied.

Above is a set of effect pedals, these are not the actual ones I’ve been using but for this purpose it’s better.
These are a set of standard stomp boxes but in digital form, the ones I use are look like a bunch of graphs and diagrams
with a bunch of random values and slides on them so I figured bright colors and funny names would be nicer to look at.

Now it was time for the sound of our main character activating the power-up called “blue cow”. I had no idea of what to use for this one, I knew that the effects of this power-up makes our main character faster, whilst everything else keeps the same pace. With that in mind I used the same principle as I did when producing “pumpmeter increase”, going for a sound that conveys “increase” and something that “rises”. In this case it was our characters speed that increases and with that I was able to create a sound that I think does the job pretty good.

Something that has been on my mind lately is how we are going to implement these sounds into our game. Will we be able to pan these effects properly? to be able to make sound of footsteps come from the right while the sound of our “pumpmeter” increasing coming from the left can be a vital part of making things sound okay. Are we going to have the ability to control volume on each individual sound effect? And how will the soundtrack’s three different parts work when transitioning from high to low? Will it even work at all? These are all things that will need to be sorted out in order for this to work properly but since I don’t have any experience with actually implementing sounds into games I’m just going to have to wait and see.

Above is a Mixer which gives you a basic overview of all your tracks and lets you adjust volume and panning.