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.