Sound Effects

I went through the some of the sound effects in our game and edited a lot of them. I also updated our google doc with the information of our sounds.

 With our short time, I've been getting most of our sounds from freesound.org and mixing a lot of them together to create new sounds that would work better with our game.

We also have outsourced some of our sound to a friend and fellow student of mine, Christian Merrill.  He's pretty good with editing and creating sounds, and I'm glad to have some help with our game as I focus on both art and sound.  I've been in contact with him to help get our game the sounds we want and need.  However, some of the sounds he has given to the team do need some work and I have been working on editing what he's given us to get the sound I and the team want.  It's a work in progress.

It's been kind of hard doing sounds, mostly for the fact that I can't get our Unity server at home and it's hard for me to listen to the sounds actually in game.  It's one to edit the music and listen to it, it's another actually listening to it with visuals.  Sadly, I'll have to make do and do my stuff quickly.  We present our games tomorrow and Thursday is our open house.  My team isn't too worried about sound effects at this time.  It isn't our top priority.  I...secretly make it my priority, though.  It's too important to me.  Next semester I hope to dedicate a lot of my time to it.  I want people to enjoy our game, both visually and audio-wise. 

I've been in contact with the sound designer, Nick LaMartina,  at BioWare Mythic for a possible sound position there.  I researched what they use and what the sound designer uses.  I found on his LinkedIn page all sorts of programs he uses and have been downloaded a lot of them (at least the free ones or trials).  I also saw that Mythic and a lot of other video game companies use Fmod or Wwise.  I really want to implement Wwise into our game.  So, I hope to read up and learn a bit about it for next semester.  It'd be really great if I could put that under my skill set as well as see what it could do for our game!

Winning Music

We needed an ending music for when the player actually reaches the end of the level.  Not very exciting if they beat the level and nothing really happens, right?  It's been shown that sound enhances emotional reaction to visuals by 30%!  So, we need something!  So, I sat down at my desktop and opened my music program, Fruity Loops.  I sat there for what seemed like FOREVER just staring at my screen and messing with sounds.  My brain was not thinking of anything.  I already needed a break; a research break.  I started listening to other victory themes from games and asked questions to myself about them.  How long are they?  Do they portray their game well and fit in with the game's theme?  What instruments are being used?



Then I started thinking about my game theme.  Chinese.  I am using Chinese sounds, what could I do with that?  I then looked up music from Kung Fu Panda.  John Powell and Hans Zimmer really bring out the Chinese and western instruments in the Kung Fu Panda series. They also do a wonderful job of bringing out the "epicness", so to speak, about the Panda being a hero and the awe-inspiring ways of martial arts.
At 44 seconds within the video below is an excellent example of this "epicness" I speak of.






After the research I went back into Fruity Loops and listened to what Chinese-like instrument samples I had and just started composing. It was hard. I'm usually pretty good at sitting down and getting a fairly good piece of music out, but this time I struggled. I did end up with a song that mixes in elements of both John Powell and Hans Zimmer not just from Kung Fu Panda, bust also from the movie Madagascar.

Overall, this isn't my best work. I did write it to loop, but I feel like there's too much going on in it. It needs a lot of touch ups or what I might to is completely compose a new piece. It works for now. It's at least something for the end. I'm not saying it's horrible, but I know I can work on it more.