I’ve been totally failing to update this blog for the last few months because I’ve been real busy! Working on a bunch of projects, some games, some not, most under NDA. But, the one that isn’t under NDA is Archvale.
I’ve been helping out with the sound, mostly focussing on weapons, boss attacks and some ambiences and it’s been a lot of fun, you can check out the trailer below, and wishlist on steam here!
Category: Sound Design
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Had a bunch of fun last week for Fuse Jam making a ridiculous helicopter flying game where you re-unite estranged couples and save love! Me & the lovely folks I worked with were all super busy so I’m pretty proud that we managed to make something that’s pretty much finished!
You can play it over on itch here. -
I’ve been working away on a few things recently, including finishing up some work on a great new podcast series for BCfm and working on a new short film with the lovely folks at CINE Ultra.
However, game wise I’m pretty quiet right now, with a few projects pending confirmation, I took the opportunity to work on some personal stuff and dug into the Celeste FMOD project to do an audio redesign of this awesome game.
I redesigned every single sound in here from scratch including all the footsteps, landings, slides, grabs etc as well as the more abstract and fun stuff. It was a great opportunity to learn a little more about FMOD too and I really feel like I’ve got a good handle on the basics now!
When I have some more time I plan to do a narrated walkthrough and maybe a more detailed blog post, but for now, check out the video below (stick around to the end to see me die repeatedly). -
Went for something closer to my usual style today, I’ve been playing quite a lot of Faster Than Light recently, so I was imagining some kind of space based game while I was writing. As it happens, I’ve also been doing a bit of playing around with Unity, using Ray Wenderlich’s online course. So, after I’d written some music, I decided to make a looping version (and a couple of quick sfx) and implement them in the demo of “Space Debris”. Here’s a screen capture of what I made:
The sound design is still pretty rough and ready, and I have only implemented single sounds for now, but I’ll share a more polished version here once I’ve finished it up. The full piece of music is on my soundcloud page here: -
This weekend I went to my first ever Global Game Jam and I had a lovely time!
I had no team when I arrived and so was put in a team with other folks who I hadn’t met before. Considering we’d never met or worked together before we managed to work together well and get a reasonably working demo of what was quite an ambitious idea together. You can download and play the game we made here: https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/airplane-graveyard-8
The theme this year was repair and we also tried to pick up a couple of the diversifiers, namely that the story was inspired by a lesser known woman from history and that the real world weather affected gameplay somehow. The basic narrative idea behind our game was that you are an airplane pilot who’s plane has gone down over a mysterious archipelago and you need to collect parts to repair your plane before a storm comes and washes you away. You can travel between the islands on a small boat. Some of the more complex mechanics (like the storm!) didn’t make it into the game due to time constraints but some of the ideas that we managed to get working in there were (in my opinion at least) quite interesting, notably that the gameplay would be affected by the weather in the real world.
The islands were procedurally generated each time the map is spawned, meaning they’re different each time. We also decided not to include any original music in the game overworld. I wrote a short theme for the menu screen but other than that all of my work was sound design and a small amount of implementation. Inspired by Galaxy News Radio from Fallout 3, we decided that the music would come from a radio that was in the boat you travel around the islands on. I did my best to select music that felt appropriate to the time period (and storm or plane related) and tried to get some songs that were released in 1937 (the year of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the inspiration behind our unnamed protagonist).
I picked four songs to play on the radio and the programmers helped me to get them to playback in a random order in Unity. Prior to this, Charlie (our writer) came up with the idea of news bulletins and weather forecasts which are affected or triggered by the weather somehow. He wrote four bulletins and we ran off to a side room to record them, along with 8 wind reports/directions (north, north east, east etc). I then edited these into eight bulletins, each with a wind direction appended to the end of it. Jason (one of our programmers) then wrote some code which would cause each of these to be triggered based on relevant wind data collected from a weather API. Jason also programmed the wind data to create an in game force which acts on the boat, pushing it in the opposite of whatever direction the wind is coming from.
So, I took all these assets (the bulletins/weather reports and four songs) and processed them using a combination of Izotopes Trash 2 and some convolution reverb to make them sound like they were playing from a radio. I then handed over the assets to Jason and we hooked them up to his code in Unity and it all worked! He also wrote some code to duck the music when the bulletins were playing and given more time I’d have like to tweak this a little as it didn’t quite work as well as I’d have liked. I’m not super experienced with Unity, but I’m sure there’s probably a simpler way of achieving this within the engine using internal bussing or something. We also simplified the mechanic by attaching the bulletins and weather reports together, but it would have been nice to keep these separate for more variety/flexibility at run time.
Aside from this, most of the assets/sound design were more straightforward but no less fun to create, I particularly enjoyed creating a loop of “plane being fixed” sounds for the engineer character who is on the island where the player character spawns. I used various sources for this but mostly a paper shredder, which sounded surprisingly good! I had a lovely time and will definitely go next year, thanks to all of my team, especially Jason and Vikki for being patient with my endless questions about programming! Also had the chance to use Adam Croft’s instant take suite in Reaper for the first time and it is really awesome! It worked very well and was really simple to set up with key commands etc so thanks Adam! I highly recommend it to all sound designers and editors using Reaper, especially if you’re switching from Pro Tools like me and rely a lot on Audiosuite as part of your workflow. -
I thought it was about time I wrote a little update of things I’ve been up to over the last few months.
I’m pleased to say I graduated from my MA with distinction in September and have been working full time at Doghouse Post ever since. Meanwhile in my spare time I’ve been keeping busy with various audio related endeavours. I finished the mix of the short film ‘Window’ which I started working on earlier this year. You can see the full movie below:I also went to my first ever game jam! The lovely Fuse Jam in Bristol. I met some lovely people here and we made a little game about floating around on a raft, I collaborated on the audio with Starshine Audio. We both did a bit of the sound design, I wrote the main level music and he wrote the ‘Pirate Mode’ music, (press F to find out what I’m talking about!) You can download and play the game here: https://itch.io/jam/fuse-jam-3/rate/493872
I’ve got my first three sound libraries online and available to buy now, two of which are still fifty percent off.
Check them out here: https://www.asoundeffect.com/sounddesigner/submerged-tapes/
Finally I made a little bitsy game, after feeling inspired post game jam. I put this together over a few weekends and it’s my first foray into game design. A short puzzler about collecting cats and finding your way home.
Check it out here: https://submergedtapes.itch.io/orbs-journey-home -
A quick post today to say that my first three sound effects libraries are available now on A Sound Effect.
They were recorded as part of my final piece of MA research and I’m pretty proud of them!
They’re all 50% off right now and available here.
That’s all for today, happy halloween! -
Last week I went to my first game jam and had a great time! Fuse Jam in Bristol. We made a little game where you float around on a boat and you can raise and lower the water level by collecting pluses or minuses dotted around the world.
You can play or download the game that we made here: https://tidalloch.itch.io/tidal-loch
I made the music that plays in the background when you start and quite a lot of the sound effects too, I collaborated on the audio with Starshine Audio.
It’s the first time I’ve ever done any kind of audio work for games and luckily folks were kind enough to help me with implementation in Unity and explaining some of the basics of how that works.
In terms of audio stuff I created the music by making multiple variations of a simple piano loop, made using Kontakt, Tritik’s Krush (which is free and awesome) and Izotopes DDLY that looped seamlessly, and then telling unity to play them in a random order.
The idea was to create the impression of the music being generative, without the serious work involved in doing that properly! I was pretty happy with the result.
In terms of sound design I kept things pretty simple due to time constraints and because my goal for the jam was more to meet people and learn a bit of unity/implementation stuff than imprve my design chops.
I used Collected Transients flusher library quite a lot though, especially for the water drain/fill sounds. Thanks to some of the folks at the jam I’ve now discovered Bitsy so the next mission is to make a little game using that and then learn how to make audio work within it! -
A short one today, to say that I’m nearly finished with my MA and I’ve been designing some sounds using the library I’ve created from circuit bending some old toys. It’s been a pretty fun process and hopefully will just be the beginning of my circuit bending adventures!
I’ll be releasing the library of sounds that I’ve recorded and created from these toys sometime over the coming months.
Check out some of the sounds here:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/674200325″ params=”color=#646467&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]
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So I’m coming towards the end of my MA studies now and as part of my final major project I decided to create some sound libraries. These are based on filling gaps within my own library, and exploring techniques and ideas that I’m unfamiliar with and interested in. So far it’s been both a steep learning curve and extremely fun!
I’ve been interviewing people who do this currently, field recording, editing, tinkering learning about metadata and all kinds of other stuff pretty much non stop for the last few months! I’ve got three libraries currently in the works and I’ll be releasing them from sometime in late October onwards. If you’re interested you can sign up for my shiny new mailing list, you’ll see a pop up form on the homepage of this site!
Okay, plug over, now back to the subject in hand, circuit bending! Specifically circuit bending some sweet old toy synthesisers, a Major Morgan and the legendary Stylophone! The Major Morgan I’ve had ever since I can remember but it was gathering dust in my dad’s house and so I brought it home with me a while ago with the intention of doing something creative with it. The Stylophone was a kind gift from my mother-in-law (she knows me well)! I’m a total newbie to the world of circuit bending, so I decided to keep it simple and just add an output jack and on/off switch to the Major Morgan.
Because he’s so small, I found it tricky to fit them in him, so inspired by this great blog post (which involves a much more complex build than mine) I built a breakout box and stuck the components in there. I followed the instructions from this article to wire up the components.
The process looked like this:
The initial opening him up and inserting bits into the breakout box
Then I built some multicore wire using heat-shrink I had kicking around and hooked up the speaker and jack
Connected up the on/off switch and proceeded to try and get everything back in the box
And here he is post surgery, looking as maniacally happy as ever…
I bought all my components from Bitsbox who are great and UK based, and it came to under a tenner in total. I used a switch jack as suggested in the article so the speaker turns of when he’s plugged in. I then went on to dismantle the Stylophone feeling emboldened by my new found circuit bending success, but then I remembered I don’t really know anything about electronics so I basically just put it back together!
I did add an LDR to the circuit, attempting to use it as a pitch bend by mimicking where the tuning knob was wired up and it did indeed affect the pitch. However, it only changed the pitch by about a semi-tone in either direction. I’m guessing it’s not providing very much resistance and this is why, any electronics aficionados please feel free to tell me if that’s correct in the comments as I’d love to get some more extreme light based pitch shifting nonsense out of the Stylophone!
Here’s some of the sounds I got out of both instruments:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/669508217″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]
This is going to be the first in a series of circuit bent toy libraries as I’ve got loads of other toys waiting to be messed with in my cupboard at home. I’d encourage anyone to give circuit bending a go, even if you know literally nothing about electronics. I didn’t know anything at all when I started this project and I feel like I’ve come away (a little) wiser and having made some fun new sounds. If you do have a go, please let me know, I’d love to hear about other folks projects and hear the sounds you make!