Rationale

Prior to this sprint, the acoustic design of the game has been primarily focused on musical soundtracks. As a team, we have assigned ourselves to the creation and testing of sound effects representing different events that occur to enemies. This will allow for a more immersive gameplay experience where the audio elements complement what is seen on screen.

Inspiration

While thinking about what sounds would best suit our game, we turned to YouTube videos that document how artists produce effects for horror movies. These videos include:

• How animal sounds are made for movies and TV
• 10 surprising ways sounds are made for movies
• How sound is used to create suspense in horror movies
• How the sound effects in 'A Quiet Place' were made

Brainstorming

We wanted to include sound effects for various events that can be triggered for enemies. This included:

• When the enemy is hurt
• When the enemy dies
• When the enemy attacks (melee enemies) or shoots (ranged enemies)
• When the enemy detects the presence of the player
• When an enemy is spawned (only by the spawner enemy)

We also needed the sound effects to be consistent with the appearance of the redesigned enemy sprites, so we worked closely with the relevant designers to ensure that this is the case.

Sound Recording

The sounds that were recorded were elicited through interaction with household objects. Some images of the recording process are below:

Here, we have the soroban used to represent the sound used when the player is detected by the small melee enemy, along with some pasta that was broken to create a bone-crunching sound when large enemies die. On the right computer screen, there is some communication that was made with team members who were responsible for enemy visual design. On the left is Audacity, which was used to record and post-process the sound effects.

In the mortar there is a tomato that was crushed to make squishing noises. Next to it is an egg that was cracked with a spoon to represent damage taken by the spawner enemy.

Other recorded sounds included:

• Blowing through a straw (with a retroflex stop syllable to articulate the sound) to represent the 'tough' ranged enemy.
• Hitting the mouth of a plastic water bottle and using its popping sound to represent the spawner enemy spawning a small melee enemy.
• Vocals for the large enemy detection grown and hiss of the large enemy being hit

Post-processing

After the raw footage was recorded, it was imported into Audacity for post-processing. This included:

• Trimming down the audio clips to just the sound effect required.
• Speeding up or slowing down sounds.
• Changing the volume of each effect so that it can be heard above the music soundtracks but not too loud that it is annoying. This was a key area of improvement that was identified during user testing.
• Layering sounds on top of each other to create a more full sounding sound effect.