Happy-Pill Power-Up Activation & Title Screen Music

This week iv’e been home, away from school and Gotland. I’ve still got work to do on our project though and this week my focus has been on cleaning up the last bit of sound effects laying around in order to completely focus my efforts on voice-overs for our main character and enemies. In addition to making some of the sounds you’ll hear in our menus i’ve worked on a sound called “Happy-Pill Power-Up Activation”. When our character takes a happy pill his “pumpmeter” will decrease by a a set amount of points, which is a good thing if you’re nearing a total heart-failure and need to cool down.

This sound, as opposed to the activation sound of our other power-up “Blue Cow” which is an energy drink that increases our main characters moving speed, was rather easy to come up with.
I simply went for the opposite of “Blue Cow”, which was the sound of something speeding up, ending with a cow mooing, and I tried to make a sound that sounded like something slowing down. After making a sound which went from high to low in both velocity and tone, which is in other words just a tone that you slow down and decrease pitch on gradually, I wanted to add something that conveyed the fact that this was a happy-pill he just ate, in order to achieve that I added a little old man’s laughter towards the end of the sound by simply recording myself chuckling.

I also made a remix of the three parts of our soundtrack which I put together and made into our title screen song, I basically took out the parts I like most out of the soundtrack and slapped them all together and was quite successful in creating something that according to me builds up suspense and gives you a small heads up of what our game’s going to be like.

When I get back to the island I need to get going with all the voice-overs for our characters, how i’m going to make that work is something i’m going to have to figure out then, i’ve got somewhat of a plan which involves me finding a good sound proof place and laying down all the voice tracks myself with some help from some of our team members. All I need basically is a Condenser microphone and a place to do the actual recording.

This is a typical Condenser type microphone, this model is great for recording voice and acoustic guitar, it can be equipped with a wide range of filters which is great for noise canceling. I will be using one of these when doing the voice-overs.

This is a dynamic type microphone, this model is best suited for higher gain instruments such as electric guitar and drums.
I have been using one of these when recording percussion sounds and some guitar through my amplifier.

Pumpmeter increase & “Blue Cow” power-up SFX

All the sound effects I’ve done so far has been pretty straight forward, although our game has a very distinct cartoonish feel to it I decided I would keep all “real” sounds simple and realistic. The sounds of feet hitting concrete or a cane striking another human being should be as similar to the real sound as possible because I wanted to keep our game from becoming too surreal. When it was time for me to produce sounds for things like an increase in our “pumpmeter” and various sounds for when picking up power-ups no particular sound came to mind and I decided that even though I wanted keep all sound effects fairly real I found no alternative to the standard cartoony sounds that you usually hear in space shooters, the sort of sci-fi inspired sounds that make you think of aliens and spaceships.

I realized that the sound I was looking for was going to have to be something that conveyed the feeling of something increasing, a “rising” sound with a climax in both pitch and velocity. The best description of the sound I can think of is if you can picture a bubble of air traveling up towards the surface in a lake. When I had constructed such a sound using several separate sounds that I modulated using various effects such as something called flanger and pitch – correct, I was pretty satisfied.

Above is a set of effect pedals, these are not the actual ones I’ve been using but for this purpose it’s better.
These are a set of standard stomp boxes but in digital form, the ones I use are look like a bunch of graphs and diagrams
with a bunch of random values and slides on them so I figured bright colors and funny names would be nicer to look at.

Now it was time for the sound of our main character activating the power-up called “blue cow”. I had no idea of what to use for this one, I knew that the effects of this power-up makes our main character faster, whilst everything else keeps the same pace. With that in mind I used the same principle as I did when producing “pumpmeter increase”, going for a sound that conveys “increase” and something that “rises”. In this case it was our characters speed that increases and with that I was able to create a sound that I think does the job pretty good.

Something that has been on my mind lately is how we are going to implement these sounds into our game. Will we be able to pan these effects properly? to be able to make sound of footsteps come from the right while the sound of our “pumpmeter” increasing coming from the left can be a vital part of making things sound okay. Are we going to have the ability to control volume on each individual sound effect? And how will the soundtrack’s three different parts work when transitioning from high to low? Will it even work at all? These are all things that will need to be sorted out in order for this to work properly but since I don’t have any experience with actually implementing sounds into games I’m just going to have to wait and see.

Above is a Mixer which gives you a basic overview of all your tracks and lets you adjust volume and panning.

SFX – Dangerous Dander

Early on in the production stage I decided that I wanted to do my own sound effects instead of using pre-recorded ones you can get online through various sound banks. My goal was to try and use midi instruments which is basically a simulated software instrument as much as possible because of the simplicity, I can easily modulate sounds through the use of effects and pre-amps, my favorite effects is a nifty little thing called Bit-Crusher, it adds a sort of Super Mario 32-bit feel to the sound.

Another great thing about using midi throughout your recording is that you’re free to change tempo without the loss of sound quality. But of course there are some sounds that are too hard to create using only software generated audio and to record them using a microphone is just so much easier. I started combining the two and added certain sounds that I thought that particular sound effect lacked for example I added the sound of a lighter hitting an empty mug of coffee made of paper to give the sound of a baseball bat hitting various enemies.  Last week I ended up walking around in the hall of the D building recording various sounds that I came across, me hitting one of the radiators in the staircase with an open palm, hitting a metal ladder, me and Simon walking through the hall, a cushion chair knocked over and me tapping my fingers against a bulletin board. I can then combine, add effects, pan, cut, change tempo in order to create the sound I want. The sounds I was going for this week was: character movement, attack and death. Trashcan death 1, 2 and 3, rubbish spawn and “pumpedmeter” decrease. I have some small plans of finding a place that’s sound-proof  and do some of the sounds by recording it using the object itself, like kicking a trashcan or hitting something human-like with a bat or a cane. Then there’s the talk of voice-overs for our game which would also require a studio of sorts. 

My typical process this week has been starting out with a base sound, typically something that describes the sound I’m going for, like for example I’d go for a trashcan tipping over and spilling it’s content on the sidewalk and in order to achieve that I usually prefer to start out with a sound that has many of the base traits required to mimic that sound, in this case me striking an object made of metal with something equally hard.
Now that sound can easily pass for a trashcan hitting asphalt, but it lacks several different key components that makes it sound realistic. For example it may be missing some treble or bass, or maybe it needs a sound to simulate the actual barrel traveling through the air, a sort of “swoosh” sound. There are many aspects of the sound you need to consider changing, for example: will the barrel bounce after its initial impact? Is the can empty? If not, you need to simulate trash moving around and possibly spilling on to the sidewalk.

Above is a part of the arrangement for the sound ”character movement” for this sound I used my recording of me tapping my finger against a bulletin board. what I did here is that I split this recording into smaller part and isolate what would be right foot and left foot hitting the sidewalk, I put those into different tracks and added just a touch of reverberation and then I adjusted the panning of the two tracks putting one a bit to the left and one to the right. After that i started to fine-tune the recordings using a channel equalizer.

First week of game development

Our first week of game design was mostly scrum documentation and going over our design document. We took some time to re-define the game we had chosen to develop – Dangerous Dander. After some thought we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to change and what we wanted to keep. Our vision was keeping the original game’s aesthetic goals and going for a different approach in setting, of course there were some details in mechanics we decided to alter but I won’t go into detail. Our last project was Bloody Badgers, a game in which I was involved with graphics, both concept and in game features such as level design. Although I thought that was a hoot, there was always a part of me wanting to write a soundtrack and with our current project I finally got the chance to do so. I got right to it and started carrying my guitar with me to school instead of my paper and pencils. I’ve had quite a lot of time fiddling with my guitar and recording various riffs and songs both in studios and at home over the years but very few of them were pieces that had any sort of deadline tied to them and none of them was to be used in serious work, I don’t have any trouble with producing a song for that purpouse, in fact i think it’s more fun that way, but my inspiration however is the one who decides to leave me in my hour of need. Most of my riffs come to me in middle of class or 3:am at night, therefore its extremely important for me to always have a way to get those ideas to paper. Luckily there are many ways for me to do that. Writing a song to a game is in many ways like developing a game, there are a lot of things you need to think about, the most important one being to make sure that the song support your aesthetic goals, For example you might not want to write reggae to a hack’n’slash game and you might not want to write hip hop to a horror game like Silent Hill.  My task this past week has been to write a song in three parts, one for each state of our ”PumpedMeter” – High, Medium and Low. I’ve decided to go with somewhat of a ”punkish” sound with hints of heavy guitars and drums. It is not going to be a masterpiece and I’ve decided to try and keep things simple, I’ve laid down bass tracks using a DropTune pedal and I’ve decided to go with midi-generated drums.