This week has been filled with pretty much the same as last week, mastering, mixing, editing, iterating and a lot of listening. It takes e certain amount of coffee to bear with these kinds of things because if you are unlucky, you could spend an entire day making sure one sound is just right, and that means playing it over and over and over and over again.
When dealing with a lot of sounds that are going to be played at the same time it’s important to make sure that each and everyone of them has an individual volume setting and in some cases it is really helpful to pan the sounds out in order to control from where the sound is coming from, not making sure to differentiate each sound can make it difficult to set them apart, therefore it is important to make sure your sounds are on different wavelengths and coming from different directions in order to prevent your audio from sounding sluggish and all melted together.
Things are slowly coming together for us and we are now down to finalizing our last artifacts and polishing the result, my job these past couple of days has been to test our game so far and listen for what sounds needs lowering or raising in volume, adjust these sounds and then put them back in. There are also some problems that can be really hard to notice if you don’t try them out in your game first, like for example if a sound needs speeding up or slowing down. One of the sounds I made was for when our melee type enemy swings his weapon and said weapon hits it’s target, I made this particular audio clip sound just like a bat swinging through the air and eventually end in loud thump, now while I was totally happy with how it sounded there was still a matter of making sure that the sound is synced with the animation, it is not a hard thing to do but when you have 20 sounds or more to adjust it can take a little while.
Melee enemy swinging his weapon.
Next week will be pure testing and balancing, I expect my job getting a lot easier when all of our sounds have been implemented because it is a lot more of an easy job to perfect something when all the pieces are there, at least for me personally. It has been a long, loooooong road from idea to final product, but it seems like there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel, and I can almost see it.
Alex Westerdahl 