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.
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