Froukje was responsible for sound design. I had a interview with her, to tell you more about the sounds in our game.
What is it that you do for sound design?
Because of timeconstraints, we did not have time to record all sounds and music ourselves. For most sounds, I found standard sounds, which I edited to fit our game better. There are a lot of parameters to edit with. You can edit standard settings, like the pitch, to make it sound lower or higher. You can also edit more advanced settings. Most have to do with the location the sound comes from. The physical location the sound comes from is very important. In an office, noise is all around you. Some sounds come from a single point, but some come from a larger area. This is all determined here.
We have not used most of those settings, because in the game engine we use, that happens automatically.
For every sound, you can configure how it should bounce around. Materials deflect sounds different, but this can also be altered for every piece of sound itself.
What software did you use?
I used GarageBand for making the music and editing the sounds. The Sennhieser AMBEO plugin was used to transfer our sound to 8D.
You just said you used 8D, what is that?
8D sound is sound that you can hear all around you. It is above you, behind you, etc. You can compare it to a surround speaker setup, but with a lot more speakers. It makes you feel like you are right there.
Every single sound has extra data attached to determine where the sound should come from. For sounds that come from a single point, this is not necessary, but for music it is important. It sucks you into the game.
Below is a fragment, which, when you have headphones on, travels in a circle around you. With different sounds and intensities, this can make people feel powerful emotions.
Because of compression, the effect is not as noticable in our game. There is also some ticking sound. This is used to follow the beat. This will not be present in our game and is only used during production.
Listen with headphones for a sample of 8D sound.
What sounds do you need to make?
There are a lot of sounds all around you that you do not notice, until you stand still and listen, but when they are not there, you miss them. These sounds are noise from wind, leaves or birds.
Background music is also important, even though that is, sadly, not there in real life. You need specific sounds for the intro and the outro.
Some things you do not think about. For a car, you need a lot of different sounds. Accelerating is different from driving at a set speed. Different speeds have different sounds and braking has a different sound, based on how hard you brake.
Walking and running are also different sounds. You can not just speed up the walking sound.
For level 2, it was even harder. There are sounds for creatures that are not real. For those creatures you really have to think about what feeling they should convey.
I want to thank Froukje for her time.