Making sound effects
Hello! Two weeks ago in this newsletter I said I wanted to work on my game’s music for a while. After sending out that newsletter I played some videogames, went to bed, and woke up the next morning with an uncontrollable urge to work on sound effects instead. And that’s all I’ve been doing since then.
Improving my game engine’s sound effect support
Up until two weeks ago, my game engine's sound effect support was extremely barebones. Once a sound effect started playing there was no way of cutting it off early or forcing it to restart, so you would hear overlapping sound effects all over the place during frantic gameplay moments. The only exception to this rule was the explosion sound in Chessplosion, which my game engine handled by having some special code that only ran for the explosion.wav sound, instead of using a robust system that would work for any sound effect.
All of that is fixed now, so it’s much easier for me to add sound effects that play nicely with each other instead of creating a cacophony of overlapping sounds. I’m not doing anything special that other game engines don’t do, but at least now my engine can do it too.
Sound effects
After bringing my game engine up to speed I made a whole bunch of sound effects. Here’s what I have so far:
I highly recommend putting on some loud arcade game music while you listen (example one, example two, example three).
I love these sound effects so far! I imagine I’ll probably adjust them all after I make the game’s music, especially the explosion sound which I took directly from my game Chessplosion, but I think these sounds are already feeling loud and arcadey. This is a huge relief, as I’ve never tried to make those sorts of sound effects before and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.
Sampled sound effects
Most of the game’s sound effects use sounds from libraries such as OSA Sounds, soundeffect-lab.info, 24 Killers SFX and FilmCow Royalty Free Sound Effects Library. I haven’t just dropped these sound files directly into the game; they’ve all been processed to sound a bit more arcade-like, and the vast majority of my sound effects are combinations of multiple samples. For example, the water splash sound consists of two layers sampled from different water recordings and the hammer KO sound is a premade arcade attack sound effect combined with a premade baseball bat sound effect.
Musical sound effects
The rest of the sound effects were made using the same 90s MIDI arcade instruments that I’m using for the game’s music. I just grabbed my MIDI keyboard, played around until I found some nice-sounding jingles and used those sounds for picking up coins, clearing rooms, bouncing on jump pads and so on. I always love making these sound effects because it’s all the joy of playing an instrument without any of the pressure to create an entire song.
Other than fixing a few bugs, those sound effects all I’ve worked on recently. My plan is to finish the rest of the game’s sound effects next week then to move on to making music, but who knows whether or not I’ll change my mind sometime in the next two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.
Anything else?
I got a perfect clear of Mr. Driller 2's 1000m mode (no deaths, all air capsules) without autofire! I think I still prefer playing the game with autofire for hand health reasons but it was fun giving no-autofire play a try, and now I'll be able to play on leaderboards and online multiplayer servers that don't allow autofire if I want to. Mr. Driller is one of my favourite games, and I really need to write a guide to help more people get into it sometime.
KIDNAMEDFINGER, the new collab album by em essex and rowan, is the most fun I've had listening to new music in a long time. It's loud and dumb and produced on a 1998 laptop (really) and you can hear it on their YouTube channel or download it for free from their delightfully 90s website, complete with downloadable wallpapers, cursors and more.
Jamie Paige's new song Birdbrain (with OK Glass) is great! It's always fun to hear this kind of big bombastic pop song with Vocaloid (or in this case, Kasane Teto/SynthV) vocals. Maybe you'll like it too.
Speaking of music on YouTube, I can't get over this 90 minute video about ninja defuses in Counter-Strike having an original soundtrack that takes up most of its runtime, made by two of the players in the video. I'm not even planning on making that much music for my game, and they did it for a YouTube video...
In game design news, Boghog's Patreon post about meters vs ammo was an interesting read. I went through a few different designs for how players should earn bombs/carrots in my game's arcade mode before finally settling on just putting them in treasure chests, and this post mirrors my reasoning for why I made that decision.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go look through the Steam Summer Sale while mashing on my MIDI keyboard to see if it makes any cool sound effects. I hope you have comfortable weather for the next couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!