Game Design 2 – Sound design of the player’s shield bouncing projectiles (Team Leviathan)

 Author : Arnaud Mimoun

  For this week’s blog I’ll talk about the sound design I worked on concerning the sound that the player’s avatar make when they get hit by a projectile and take damage.

For this asset I made a total of 3 sounds :

 

• Here is the first sound

• Here is the second sound

• Here is the third sound

• Here is the fourth sound

• Here is the fifth sound

• Here is the sixth sound

• Here is the seventh sound

• Here is the heighth sound

 

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 started working on the Bouncing sounds for the shield I knew that these sounds would be very present through the totality of the game. Therefore my reflection focused on making sounds that would be heard through the whole game without getting annoying. I quickly came to the conclusion that to reach this ideal I would need to create several different sounds in order to create diversity.

I first created a set of 4 sounds that were the first sounds I ever created. When making them I was just discovering the software and it was a lot of trying without ending on much results at first. I didn’t discouraged myself and kept trying and ended up with a first set of sounds. These 4 sounds are probably not the best one in the game but it have been a start.

  When making these bouncing sounds I focused on making a common ground with one of the sound effect composing the bouncing sounds being in all 4 of the differents bouncing sounds I made. The feel I wanted to transmit was the proximity to get hit, to give this feel I focused on a brutal impact sound when a projectile hit, followed by a bouncing sound reminding the one of a flipper. To had much of a space feeling I also tried to had some kind of electricity/electronic sounds to remind the sci-fi theme.

  I continued working on other sounds for the game as the project was going by and eventually got more skilled on using FL studio. Once that I had  learned a bit I felt like I needed to rework the bouncing sounds because they were my first try and I wasn’t feeling good about just having these 4 very basic sounds for the bouncing. I decided to give a couple of hours to create another set of 4 sounds with much effects in it in order to create more diversity. I followed the same kind of logic to create them using electricity effects and other electronic sounds.

  I decided to finally keep the 4 sound I had done at first and add the 4 new ones I just created a month later. My idea about it was to create more originality in the bouncing sounds with a contrast between these first very basic sounds and the ones that I had spend much work on. Considering the bouncing sounds in question will be played a lot through the game it felt logical to have more differents sound effects for this action that would be repeated all the time through the game. Finally all of these sounds will be played with random pitches thanks to unity and I expect a lot of diversity from it but yet that all of these sounds feel linked to each others with a common ground of sound effects.

Game Design 2 – Sound design of the player taking damage (Team Leviathan)

Author : Arnaud Mimoun

   For this week’s blog I’ll talk about the sound design I worked on concerning the sound that the player’s avatar make when they get hit by a projectile and take damage.

For this asset I made a total of 3 sounds :

• Here is the first sound

• Here is the second sound

• Here is the third sound

 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 the player’s avatar taking damages I first did a reflection work on what I wanted the player to feel when he gets hit. My thinking was that through the game, the player will be threatened by a lot of enemies but the shield offers a certain security. Therefore when a projectile would succeeds to pass through the shield of the player he should really feel like he did a mistake.

  To give back this feeling I made theses sounds of taking damage slightly longer than the other sound effects so that the player can fully realises his mistake. The feel of having failed will also be displayed by the graphic visual of the player’s avatar. The player will have 3 lifes represented through 3 little lights on the ship. Whenever the player will get hit by a projectile and take damage one of the lights will go off. Scratches and other destruction marks will start to appear on the player’s spaceship also displaying to the player that he is falling into pieces.

One of the main feel that we want our player to experience is “danger”. Which is why the player can’t shoot but only defend himself through the bouncing mechanic. The best way of making our players feel in danger is to show them in real time how close they are to get destroyed and die. To give this feel of tension rising as the player lose health points I thought it was important to make different sounds, one for each level of damage that the player’s avatar reach. According to that idea, I made the sound for the first health point lost a light one with mainly electrical failure noises.

  The second sound is more « explosive ». I did it with much focus on the smaller explosions happening on the ship and the shortcuts burning up. I wanted the player to feel that he tooks some serious damages and now got only one life to finish the level. Pressure on.

  Finally for the last sound, the one that marks your death I really made it full of explosions and last longer than the two previous ones. I wanted the players to feel that it was over. According to this goal I thought it was important to give them right away the information that their spaceship was off and from the sound of it, would not be able to keep going.

Game Design 2 – Sound design of the Net-bouncing (Team Leviathan)

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 :

 

• Here is the first sound

• Here is the second sound

• Here is the third sound

• Here is the last sound

 

 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

Game Design 2 – Sound design of the GUI (Team Leviathan)

Author : Arnaud Mimoun

  The assets that I am going to review this week are the 3 sounds of our Menu.

• There a sound for when you are pressing a button of the menu 
• One for when you are going back on the menu 
• And finally one for when you launch the game 

   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 made the sound for the menu I wasn’t sure at first of what I wanted to make so I first collected sounds that I had a good feeling from. Once I had a database of 10 different sounds I sorted out 7 of them and decided to work with it. After listening to all these sample I was more sure about what I wanted to create and therefore my idea was to make a menu sound design that would appeal to our targeted audience.

  Following this idea I created at first a very “Arcade” kind of sound for when you click on the different options of the menu. I wanted the player from our targeted audience whom are not regular players to feel like they were back into these arcade games of their youth right from the menu. Therefore I made a simple yet very “game-feeling” sound for when you click.

  Once I was satisfied with what I created, I decided to also make a sound for when you go back in the menu. Nothing was more simple as I choosed to take the original sound I had and play backward to see how it would sound like, and that was exactly what I wanted. The sound play when you do the opposite of clicking a menu (going back) and you can get that just from what you hear, the feeling I wanted for it was here.

  Finally I decided to make an original sound for when you actually launch the game and press the button for it. The idea was to tell the player that the real experience start now from the moment they clicked that play button. To give that feeling to the player I decided to make a longer sound and in it I added at the end this high pitch note that kind of remind of when you used to start a game boy. The little high pitch ending noticing you that you were in.

  Another reason for me to design this sound in a longer format was the way the game start when you press play. The background of the menu will actually be the background of the game and when you will start, the menu will fade away and you’ll be right away in the game wandering in space. Making a sound that would last the time that the menu start to fade away was then necessary to give a feeling of transition.