This post will talk about the music and sound effects I have made so far for WarPath. I love doing this stuff, and especially enjoy making my own sounds from scratch and making music from the smallest components up.
Explosions
Rather than try to find some explosions on a sound effect CD, I really wanted to do my own. For my first attempt, I recorded a load of vocal explosion sounds, chose the best one, and played with processing it. I layered it up at different pitches and tweaked the EQ with a parametric equaliser. The result was passable but a little bit long and full of harmonics, so when layered up in-game there was a lot of phasing evident.
For attempt two I thought it best to make an entirely synthetic explosion for utmost control and purity. Explosions in real life tend to sound pretty much like very loud, very deep booms with debris noise. But the idea of the sound of an explosion we get from the telly and in films sounds like over-driven microphones trying to record real explosions. They have a characteristic envelope of loud initial chaotic impulse as the mic capsule tries to deal with the intense sound pressure, with a long tail of reverb, air noise and low rumble. There seemed to be little sense working much on the rumble as the target is the iPad speakers, and too much reverb or debris noise would quickly get tired to the ear as many explosions occurred simultaneously and repeatedly. But working on that noisy, overdriven sound could invoke just the right image to the ear.
I made a synth patch consisting of white noise with a short attack and longer decay, and applied a filter envelope that would close down a low-pass filter over about the same length of time. Then I put it entirely through EQ to boost the lows and highs followed by an aggressive overdrive/saturator effect. Lots of tweaking of the envelopes and a tiny bit of reverb later and I have a much nicer explosion sound that is exactly as long as I want it. To add variety I recorded several takes of the sound with very slightly different filter settings and timings.
Buttons and Switches
The first thing I tried was recording all the switches in reach of my mic cable and found a lot of very short, loud, transient sounds which were often unsatisfying when stripped of room reverb and the physical response of the real switch. I managed to get one good sound for the switches out of this. For the second attempt at button presses I recorded some vocal palette tongue clicks which can sound quite like a woodblock but gives a lot of variation in performance to choose from. The way-point interaction pops and clicks are also sounds from my vocal repertoire, recorded, trimmed and equalised.
Music and Riffs
For the music I envisaged a slightly quirky military march piece, but didn’t want to just rip off the excellent rendition of this brief found in Wii Play’s Tanks! game. So I went and listened to a load of military songs and identified for myself the features and patterns that made them sound particularly military, and tried to recreate the melodies and playing techniques in a simplified way with default patches and sounds. Once I had a melody and song-structure that passed Stu’s inspection, I filled in the sounds of the instruments with real instrument samples from various libraries. After testing on iPhone speakers, I added a kick-drum with more mid-range beater sound to complement the realistic but very low-frequency military bass drum sample I used.
Having completed the music, I performed some extra riffs and phrases with the same instruments for in-game events. The pause menu sound is meant to invoke a military marching band coming to a halt, and the player fanfares are as if each player is announced by her own slight variation on a simple bugle call.
Player Fanfares
Pause
To be furthered…
At this point the sounds and music are still work-in-progress, as so much depends on how they perform on the iPad in play, which I don’t have physical access to. The relative volume and EQ of sounds can be tweaked endlessly and it’s impossible to judge the sound reproduction performance of a device without testing. Play testing will also reveal other places and interactions that feel like they should have a sound, and new stuff will be added.
