The sound effects of Ducky's Delivery Service [AUDIO]

Sound effect programming

I started out by making a big list of which sound effects I even needed: picking up a package, delivering a package, bumping into a wall, lava dripping from the volcano ceilings, moving the cursor around in menus, and so on. Because I was in a programming mood after that, I wrote all of the code for telling the game to play the right sound effects at the right times. The only problem was that I didn't have any sound effects yet, so I just made every single sound effect use the hihat cymbal that plays when you destroy a target in Chessplosion's puzzle mode. I really can't recommend this approach for other people, because it quickly got super annoying to listen to:
But hey, at least the programming was all done! With that out of the way, I could start making the sound effects themselves.

Making sound effects

There are lots of directions I could have gone in when making the sound effects for Ducky's Delivery Service. Some games use realistic sounds for that ULTRA NEXTGEN AAA Sound Design feel, some games use more exaggerated sounds, some games have musical-sounding sound effects using 8 bit or more modern instruments, and some games use a mixture of all of those.

For things like picking up and delivering packages, watching the timer count down to zero, and using the menus, I ended up going with musical sound effects. I composed them in REAPER, the same software I use to make music. I even used the same electric piano as the game's music, but with a regular piano sound layered on top to cut through the background noise. And because most of the music in the game uses just one scale (D Dorian), I can make sure that the sound effects don't clash with the music unless I want them to! Here's what it sounds like if you listen to all of the musical sound effects in a row:
When it comes to the rest of the sounds in the game...I'm not entirely sure what they're going to sound like yet. My current plan is to use realistic sounds for some of the more subtle actions like landing on the ground, but I haven't decided what to do for things like falling stalactites and dripping lava. I'm going to experiment with some more realistic sounds and some more abstract sounds, and we'll see how it goes!

Getting sound effects for free

Making your own sound effects is difficult. I'm friends with a few other solo indie game developers, and they all say that it's their least favorite part of making a game. So a lot of people use free stock sound effects instead! If you're a developer with no budget who wants free sounds for your game, here are the places where people tend to go:

Western indie developers usually recommend freesound and OpenGameArt for general sound effects, and bfxr for generating 8-bit sound effects. Freesound and OpenGameArt both allow anyone to submit sounds and allow a variety of licenses, so there's a huge variance in quality and you might not be allowed to use some of the sounds in commercial games. Be careful out there!

The two main sound effect libraries that I see used in Japanese indie games are this one (English mirror here) which was used in basically every doujin game from the past 20 years, and this one which is a bit newer. If you just need some standard sound effects for some standard videogame actions, you really can't go wrong with these! There's a very good chance that any sound effects I don't compose myself for Ducky's Delivery Service will be taken from these two sound effect libraries.


And that's all I've done this week, other than having a great time being very bad at the Touhou game Great Fairy Wars. My next goal is to finish the rest of the sound effects and to record some gameplay footage for some upcoming events, and then I can get back to working on the game's music. I'll see you next week with another update!