Creating sound for video games

Introduction

Sound and music play a huge part in many video games, they help immerse the player in the universe, and they allow developpers to give feedback in different ways. Tom, our teacher this week introduced my classmates and me to sound design. We started by playing a game he helped developp, called Matter. After playing it, we had to describe what feeling the music and sound gave us, what it reminded us of. He then explained how he made each sound and what were his goals. He then asked us to create 3 sound effects using online sound banks or by recording ourselves and then editing everything together.

Choices

The 3 sound effects we had to create were : A rocket launcher inital blast, a gore sound (cutting flesh for example), and a spell sound. Tom asked us to begin by searching for sound assets which could be used to create this 3 effects. I started with the rocket launcher effect. After searching through different sound banks, I found 4 different effects to create what I wanted : A bottle being opened ("Pop" sound), a chamber decompression sound (to simulate air expulsion from the rocket launcher barrel), a propulsion sound, and an explosion sound.

I followed the same step for the Gore and Spell sound, searching for different assets for different parts of the sound effect but for the spell sound I made all the noises myself, using my microphone and doing different sounds with my mouth by blowing, whistling or even croaking (like frogs).

Editing

Once I got all the sounds I wanted, I started adding different effects, such as pitch shifting, distorsion, or even reverberation, until I ended up with a result I was pleased with. The result for the rocket launcher can be listened to below (there may some technical difficulties, sorry if you can't listen to the track) :

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