Sounds for games project update : Forestfighter

The Forestfighter project has been a well managed, constantly progressing one and personally I’ve learnt more about creating synths and sounds from scratch, tweaking sourced sounds to make them fit a brief and have further developed my workflow for sound design and composing, and on top of that I’ve got a growing sound library of pixelated game sounds. So it goes without saying that it’s been a rewarding game to work on.

At this point the game is at the stage of playtesting it’s first level, most of the assets on the list, from all the collaborators have been submitted and we’re all making sure we haven’t missed anything, so basically we’re at the home stretch.

Completing the asset list

Going through the sound assets took some imagination and creativity at times, submitting multiple sounds for more ambiguous assets and sometimes it was as simple as slight tweaks to sourced sounds from free sound sites such as https://www.freesound.org. Whatever way they came I used similar processing to give them the pixelated sound the producer was looking for, this usually meant EQing out the highs and lows and using a bit crusher plugin to give a Lo Fi distortion. This is a playlist of all the sounds made for this game so far:

As you may notice there are sounds made that weren’t on the asset list, these came up during development such as the boulder rolling and after the playtest such as the tree regrowth. This process of new assets popping up should be expected when taking on a creative media project for ideas come up and creative projects are never truly finished the deadline just hits.

With the music I’m hoping to compose a few extra gameplay tracks because the game will be around 10 levels and having 1 song over that length will get repetitive and probably annoying. This is some feedback recieved for the audio after the playtest:

This confirmed that I want new songs to accompany the ones I’ve made because If a song is stuck in your head after one level it will be driving you crazy after ten! So far these are the songs I’m happy with and have submitted to the producer:

The home stretch

To me being on the last few weeks before the deadline means being available to make any last minute changes on request, actively communicating to the team about any thing that needs sound or music and looking at art assets for possible sounds. It’s like an entire group scan sweep looking for any missing pieces that could make the product as good as it can be, so far I made the tree regrowth sound and I’ve got a few extra boulder sounds and at least one more song to compose. Next post on this game will hopefully include a link to the full playable game.

JDuggan