Game Design 2 – Sound design of the Net-bouncing (Team Leviathan)
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Author : Arnaud Mimoun For this week’s blog I’ll talk about the sound design I worked on concerning the sound that the projectiles of the game make when they bounce on the net/border of the screen. For this asset I made a total of 4 sounds :
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 got started working on the sound of « Net-Bouncing » it was during one of our working meeting with the rest of my team. I already had created the sounds for when the projectiles bounce on the shield of the player. When I designed the sound for the bouncing of projectiles on the shield I knew that I wanted to give to the player the feeling that he just had escape death and was close to the impact zone aka the danger. But for the bouncing sound of projectiles hitting the net the feel of it needed to be different. The sound in question would be heard a lot through the game and hearing it would not signal as much proximity to danger than the actual sound of bouncing on the shield. According to this logic I thought that I would need to build up different sounds for the same event. If I could manage to make several different version of the bouncing sound on the net, then they could be played randomly in unity. And these sounds randomly played could as well be played at random pitch, adding even more diversity to it. To design how this types of bouncing sounds should sound like I first focused on what they were actually bouncing on. The projectile will bounce on an energetic net that enemies set at the beginning of the game to trap the player in it. The feel I had to give the player when a projectile bounce on it then was that the net was nothing but close to break. I also wanted the sound to remind the player that the net was his enemy as it keep him imprisoned and free for the waves of enemies to try shut him down. According to this logic I tried to design an aggressive sound that would also remind the player that his attempts of breaking it with projectiles would be vain. I worked with a lot of electrical kind of sound to give this kind of « mean » feel to the bouncing sounds on the net. I also wanted the sound to be heard with less punch and more fading than the sound of the bouncing on the player’s shield. The idea I got with this was to remind the player that the net was not ass dangerous as a projectile bouncing on his shield but also that the net doesn’t mind getting hit much and that right now he couldn’t do anything to break it, a bit like the net didn’t care at all about what was happening. I was then decided to make different sound but still as adding a common ground to all of them so that even if they are different sounds. They would still sound like a projectile bouncing on an energetic net so I tried creating following these logic. I started to build a file from the database of sounds I collected with all the sound that I thought, could fit well together to create a bouncing sound of a projectile on an energy net. Once I was satisfied with enough sounds, I started to assembly them in different way and different editing to create the actual sounds. The result ended up coherent as the 4 sounds I created all shared common component that would relate one to another. Thanks to the common sharing of each sound it ended up being theses mixes of unique sound that still logically sound like Projectiles bouncing on a net. I am pretty happy with the results  |