Sounds!

This week I have been working with sounds for our game Trowl. Sounds are at the core of the game experience and should not be taken lightly. This is why I have chosen around thrity sounds out of two thousand. I have cut them to an appropriate length and I am determined to find the most immersive, best sounds for the game.

Finding the correct and proper sounds was not an easy task. It took me hours upon hours sort out the good from the bad and the best from the good.

An example of bad choises for our ambient train sound were, tractors (they do not even sound the like), heavily trafficated highway noises and even space ships! In the end I settled with a speeding train sound that I cut to make it seamless that I am very pleased with myself.

Many of the sounds we used for our game were found in “the art of foley” CDs, you can find a website about it here. This Foley artist has a vast array of items that he uses in different and imaginative ways. It can be anything from heartbeats to birds chirping to trains honking, all which I needed for the game. Finding a suiteable tone was not easy because most of the time it was not listed in a particular name, for example “Soundtrack95” which was not really helpful and it took a lot of effort to sort it out and cut it.

The program I used to listen to all the sounds was at first VLC, in which I opened a sound file and listened to it for a few seconds, fast forward, and if I found it interesting I put it in a “Maybe” folder. After this was done for about two thousand sound files, I had deleted 9/10 of all the files.

Now that I had lots of “Maybe” folders, those needed sorting as well. So what I did next was naming the files to something in-game-related and I ended up with, sometimes, 20 sounds for the same asset.

Next I added a “Yes this will be used in game” folder that turned out to be around 100 uncut sounds for the game. I listen to them all once more to sort out only the best sounds. Now that they were named I simply opened the corresponding file from our “Game Sound”-List and cut them to an appropriate length with a program called Audacity which is awesome for cutting sound files and music.

Now we have 29 high quality sounds, none of which are duplicates for our game Trowl!