Hi all,

I'm part of a team that recently released a game on Steam. Personally I wasn't quite happy with the variety of the sound effects. Watching Let's Plays of our game it became painfully obvious how often the same sound effects repeated, e.g. creature sounds and weapons despite having a few variations of each and using simple pitch shifting.

Has anyone used techniques or assets to increase variation? For example I could imagine breaking a gunshot into different phases (e.g. click, shot, shell ejection, decay) and vary the individual samples/pitches/timing. Creature sounds seems more complex though because I can't see obvious segments, although I have heard that in movies they often compose creature sound effects from a variety of sources layered and transformed separately.

Any advice appreciated,

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tags: play Color Switch online and online free shooting games and free games to play

Hi,

Breaking down gunshots is what I always do if possible. Body, sub, mechanical, tail, shells etc. I've used mostly Wwise as a middleware and it's easy to get multiple different sounds when every layer has as at least 3-6 different sounds and they go to their own random container. And then you can randomize the timings, pitch and high-pass filter of every layer.

I think it's doable in Unity as well with the same principles in mind :)

Maybe monster sounds could be done with different layers also but it needs a bit more careful approach. Maybe you could have at least two layers: the main monster sound and something to blend under it. Both can then have multiple variations. Of course depending on the monster you can have more layers like scream, gargle, growl, breathing and a main definitive monster layer.

One technique I used in my older title Square Shooter was to have several different pew-pew sounds for the game's only weapon, and select among them randomly every time a bullet is fired. Another technique I used in Attack Vector was to have a rich sound landscape, so that a lot of sounds overlap all the time, making it less obvious there's just a few of them. Neither is perfect. Both help. And it's a lot easier than making actual dynamic sounds.