notesdontmatter

Audio Arts - Week 9 - Game Audio Design (1) – Assets

The assets I have created are for the following game objects:

- Menu noises
- Shotgun blast
- Frying player in Lava

Menu noises:

My approach was to go back to Bidule as suggested by Christian as the fastest option for creative sound design. I wanted the bleeping sound for indicating mouse clicks in the menu screen of Open Arena to be unique, so I sourced the raw audio from a Bidule additive synth and racked up a line of audio processing effects routed through and audio matrix for easy accessibility.

The new bleep is essentially a single harmonised tone from the synth, run through a KT Granulator and stereo flanger with some tweaking to gain desirable subtlety in reverberation, feedback and delay.

Shotgun Blast:

This was relatively easy as I found some reasonable audio to work with on soundsnap.com. I combined a couple of explosive sound files with a diving low tone generated in bidule, and added an audio file of a mechanical lock in use for the shell ejecting clicks. Reverb was kept to a minimum as the original game file had little, most probably this will be a variable controlled by the GAE.

Frying Player in Lava:

This sounded straightforward until I realised the difficulty of creating a non-rhythmic short loop that could potentially repeat more than several times in a row during game play. I sourced some fire and frying sounds online once again, but as soon as a file introduces a peak of miniscule difference to the rest of the file it is immediately noticeable as an unrealistic artefact. Sourcing a bit of altered white noise from bidule and playing with the mix help a lot, but it’s far from satisfactory. The main problem is that the original file cannot be altered too much in the time domain and it was very short, due to the ‘jump in jump out’ scenario that would occur when a player falls in the lava. Oh well, I guess people will want to stay out of there during game play anyway

Click here to link to online folder containing Mp3 examples and my current assets register.

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts - Week 9 - Game Audio Design (1) – Assets.” Lecture presented at Tutorial room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 2nd October, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 12:31 PM