The Sounds of the World

Hello all!  For this weeks log I am going to be talking about sound.  Of the five senses, there are two that are really involved in PC gaming, sight and sound.  That means that sound is about 50% of the immersion when it comes to the senses that one uses when playing games.  With that level of importance declared, we must delve into what sounds are needed and how we make them fit into both style and immersion

Our game has the style of a late PSX/Early PS2 Game, which means audio will be midi quality, or maybe the quality of a CD if we are lucky.  This is something we must keep in mind while sourcing and editing the audio that we are using.  The main example of audio I will be showcasing is the audio for hitting the isopod style bugs, and I will be going into detail on what I did to edit the sound to mesh with our game.  

The base effect of the isopod hit was a bit of chittering that  would be made by a squirrel or some other smallish rodent.  This did not sound at all like the noise that would be expected from a snail, and it is relatively high quality, something we actually do not want for this game.  The first thing that I did to the sound was speed it up just a little bit in Audacity.  This was done for two reasons.  The first being that the sped up version of the sound has a bit more high pitched sounds, which feel more bug like, and the second being that the noise plays when the isopod dies, and therefore should be a short cry instead of a longer sounding chitter.

The second thing that I did to the audio was get rid of the bass from the original sound and then amped up the treble.  This adds a sorta Pokémon vibe to the isopod that I was not initially anticipating to happen, but after some adjustments I was pretty happy with the screechy noise that sounded like a panicking distressed creature, which is what these isopods are. 

A similar treatment has been done to all of the effects we have in the game.  I have gone into Audacity and manually adjusted the equalizer and added different sorts of distortion to the sounds to provide a polished yet retro feel that properly conveys the feeling that sound should give to a game.