Audio! Finally!

The best news first: I'm half happy with what I have as a soundtrack!

Soundtrack

Before I go too into what I have created, I want to acknowledge the way sound works in most recent video games. A lot of horror games in particular, and a lot of Triple A titles have orchestras at the composers whim, to be able to create atmosphere, rather than song. For example, being able to crossfade certain tracks when a player views something in the background. The most classic example of this is the jump scare in horror games, suddenly slamming down on a piano or sinister strings slowly fading in. Whilst this is a great example of what audio can do in games development, this isn't my aim with my project. Instead, I want to take a step back to the NES era of themes. I'm not suggesting I can create a theme akin to Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy, but having a theme play in an area will be easier (and harder at the same time) for compositions sake, and perhaps for coding as well.

For sure it could use a lot of work, and it still sounds very amateurish, but it captures a theme of a dungeon relatively well. Combat is still something I am striving to add, as a small dungeon crawl esque part of the game, where the player can loot materials.

When I started this song in particular, I wanted the town theme, as that's the biggest part of the game for certain. I had set up a small ensemble of strings, choir pads, brass and harps, but the more I started trying to get things down on paper, the less it sounded like a town theme.

The town serves as the main playing point, and needs something that's simple, not too distracting, not too upbeat, but still has a happy tone. I think it's the harp that changed the mood, but I'm not amazing at music theory.

So, as time went on, eventually I got the impression that it would fit a mysterious cave. Had this been any other RPG I could see this track in particular belonging to a cavern of crystals or something along those lines. As stated many times before, it's something i am struggling with a great deal, so I just rolled with it to be able to show something on the date of the showcase.

Foley

Annoyingly, Blogger doesn't allow you to just add small .wav clips that will play on the blog, but what you can do is link to youtube videos. At this point I'm debating throwing them all into a youtube video, and it may not take long, but there are more important things to tackle for the time being.

At time of writing, I am just finishing up exporting the last of the foley sounds. I had created an asset list for 3D modelling which also helped as a reference when creating foley sound effects. Naturally I don't have a hammer, chisel, saw, old crumpled map, sword and scabbard etc at hand, and this is why Foley is an ingenious method to make your game sound alive.

The easiest sound I created for certain were the footsteps. I have been blessed with a pair of working feet, and it was a matter of walking around on carpet, on a grassy area, on stones and pebbles, and on a wooden surface. Each gives their own sound that I can work with to make the characters footsteps sound different dependant on the surface they are walking upon. I think in game the only two will be stone and wood, as its a medieval fantasy setting, not much else would exist like metal floors, but a small attention to detail like that adds to the immersion and realism of the game! 

That being said, realism isn't the aim of the game. It's hard to describe exactly what I mean because I am pretty bad at articulation, but hopefully you understand the jist of it.

Another part of Foley was creating little menu beeps and boops to use when navigating the UI. Unfortunately what I have at the moment doesn't quite fit, as it was made by crossing a sine and a sawtooth with some reverb effects in the EXO2 sampler. When I asked about making UI sounds, a lot of response was to use simple sine waves, but this can potentially disconnect the player from the immersion when they hear a heavily synthesised beep when navigating their inventory. I can see this changing later down the line, but for the time being its good to have something.

A lot of the foley I recorded, despite being in a proper foley studio with a field recorder, picked up a lot of chatter through the walls that I physically couldn't hear. It shows up a lot on recording, but it was as simple as using both the noise reduction tool in Audacity (I purposefully recorded a second or two of silence before each sound to give the software a noise profile to work with) and the EQ tool in Logic X. I could have used the EQ tool in Audacity as well, but Logic has a real time analytic EQ, so it was a lot easier to see what needed to be boosted or reduced in what frequencies and took out a lot of the guess work I would have had to do in Audacity.

To give any aspiring foley artists a source of inspiration I would first suggest they look elsewhere, because I am by no means good with sound work, this is all new to me and I am using what little knowledge I had to create sounds that sound like sounds. But a few examples:

A paper bag I rustled up a lot to simulate the opening and closing of a rolled up old map
Scraping two metal bars against each other to simulate sheathing and unsheathing of a sword.
A metal bar against wood, both flat on and at an angle, to get a sound of sawing and filing. (It doesn't sound realistic but it's passable for sure)

Rattling coins around in my hand and dropping them on the floor for a wide variety of currency sound effects, gaining money, picking up money, spending money
A laptop messenger bag opening and closing and being placed on a desk for various inventory sounds

Management

So I'm starting to feel a bit of pressure with the project, and that I'm not using my time well. I got a surprising amount done in the audio section of development, and modelled a table, chest of drawers and a spindle, but I am starting to feel as though I am lagging behind my goals. The Hack and Plan I had set up does kind of reflect this, although I am not making the most out of this website at all. Way long ago I had described how I had a lot of issues with trying to predict what I want when I want it, and Hack and Plan requires an estimated time, to know if you are on goal or not. It took me 35 minutes to create around 30 sounds, where I would have given myself an entire day. I struggle to gauge things appropriately.

Before the month end I am hoping to at least have a start in texturing certain assets, making the most out of the DDO tool in Quixel to very quickly apply textures to some of the more simple meshes. I don't think I have touched any coding all week, so to be able to start on the progress bars for the crafting system would be ideal, and maybe even basic implementation of this wouldn't take too long either, being able to add and subtract values from the progress bar to start getting the main mechanic under way.