Finding and Designing the right Sound (Digital Prototype)
After the lecture with the sounds, I really got inspired to make some kick-ass sounds for the game, now with the mechanics already being very simple it’s just a case of incorporating more interaction in the game or a least more feedback to player to “complete” the experience.
So how do I enhance this I had to start thinking what would be essential to creating the ambience of the game or making it more believable. What sounds did I need?
Movement sounds - how the player will make the steps sounds in the game
Jumping Sounds - Considering the player will be jumping around the map, there should be a sound to signify the impact of the jump
An enemy death sound - a sound should play to give notification to the player that the virus is died or one part of it is dead, it shouldn’t just be visual representation either.
And finally a backing track- some music to give the atmosphere of where you are
Now I don’t have the complete tools to create all of these sounds and the wonderful thing about designing sound is that you can take other sounds and really dig into the meat of the sound, changing it into something completely different. You can manipulate that sound and transform it to your liking, you just need to find the right one, or even create the right one and everything can be transformed.
Ahh the power of sound is insane.
Another note is creating the correct type of sounds for the game, where the player will inside the bloodstream so I really have to consider sounds that can be best described as “gooey, fleshy and moist”
Now with all of this information I’ve had to take some water like sounds which I was able to find, but again I also am the guy who likes to transform anything whenever I can. To do any of these edits I used FL Studio and Audacity and below will be a slideshow of some of the edits I made and how I did them
Here are the sound if you want to give them a listen, they are very short and I’ve even organised them into sections to make it easier, plus they are also labelled
Shooting Sounds 1-4
When designing the sound, I have to think how a White Blood Cell would shoot an Antibody out of it’s inner material, shooting would mean a gun sound, but because it’s inside the body it needs to sounds like a mix between a rapid burst and liquid sound. How will this work, by blending those sounds together. Luckily I already possessed a gunshot sound in my music library which has the rapid sound and I managed to also find a squishy-like sound in there too.
I also layered the sounds together alongside water gun sound effect I found on Youtube which I stated in one of my previous posts, if you haven’t seen it, check out the previous post. I also made more than one to keep it feeling dynamic and less generic for the tone of the experience. There’s a big variation of gooey sounds so I wanted to emulate that
Walking Sounds 1-3
I found this link to be helpful I decided to manipulate the sounds I got from here, effectively I made more than one sound again to make the game seem more dynamic then it actually is.
Link to original sound: https://soundbible.com/789-Cartoon-Walking.html
Jump Sound
With the jump sound, I wanted to make it fairly simple, but then it has to be a distinctive sound for jumping so the player knows that sound is caused by jumping. That sound defines the action. Cleverly, because I thought that walking is associated with the ground and jumping is associated with the sky, I took it as a decision to reverse the sound of one of the walking sounds, and adding a little reverb to make it so the player is jumping off a fleshy, moist surface.
And this is the result:
Enemy Death Sound
Finally the enemy death sound I actually recorded myself doing very silly noises, but it really doesn’t sound like it. I mixed a subtle roar and layered whilst also incorporate sounds that are small outbursts of almost sounding like “fart” sounds. I did say almost not completely, but this is the end result:
Now when it came to sending all of this information to the team, I had to make it so that it’s easy for everyone to understand, I mean I was a little basic with the naming conventions but ultimately if it gets the point across why does it matter and thankfully, Unity is actually very good with sounds. It accepts quite a few different audio formats and comes with it’s own mixer to adjust the volume of the sound. But because I’m just that good, I also made sure the sounds for the game have already been adjusted to at least make it pleasant to play alongside. So the team didn’t need to do anything to change it
Simple File structure and easy enough to pick about. That’s what we all love to see