Here's part 2 of my series of blog posts explaining some of the audio systems I designed for our game Dieper and Deaper (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dieper-deaper). This time, I'm discussing the "Animal Crossing style" gibberish I used for Dieper's voice. The game is developed in Unity, with FMOD for all the audio.

Dieper is the player character's partner, waiting outside in the van while you infiltrate the building. He speaks to the player via an earpiece/walky talky type of system. This manifests as text bubbles, each letter appearing in succession. I wanted to try to make the cartoon-y gibberish sound effect made famous by Animal Crossing.

One sound per letter

In order to create sounds that are at least somewhat related to the text being spoken (despite being quite abstract), I decided to map the sounds to the alphabet and have the UI trigger a separate sound for each letter. I recorded myself saying every letter of the alphabet (or making open vowel sounds for variety), and created separate FMOD events for each letter. I sped up the recordings, and processed them to have a crackly radio quality to them.

It turned out that one sound per letter was too dense, so we only played the sounds on alternating letters. I also tried both high pitched voices (similar to the NPC barks in the game), as well as a lower mumbly sound, and decided that the contrasting low voice worked better. I also added some radio static sounds that trigger at the beginning of each new speech bubble, as well as when Dieper finished speaking to add to the walky talky effect.

Triggering the events and adding questions

To trigger the sounds, I named all my alphabet events single characters (A, B, C etc...), and fed the current letter into my FMOD PlayOneshot command. As an extra detail, we decided to have the sounds pitch up at the end of sentences that finish with a question mark, to give the questions a different cadence. I simply duplicated my alphabet events, pitched them all up, appended their names with a 1, and checked for the next letter in code (if it's a ?, then add 1 after the letter to the OneShot command, triggering the higher pitched versions).

Conclusion

In the end, creating this system was more about the experiment than the results for me. I believe it works quite well as it is, but could be significantly improved given some time to fine tune the actual recordings (and possibly the speed of playback). All in all, it was a fun little challenge!

Thanks for reading!

I hope this is of interest to some. If anybody has any questions or remarks regarding FMOD or the system, please let me know in the comments! And of course, go check out our game "Dieper and Deaper" to hear the system in action!

You can also find part one of this blog series, discussing the adaptive music system here: (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dieper-deaper/dynamic-audio-systems-in-dieper-deaper-01-adaptive-music)