Find out in They Buggin!, an ant colony defense game

PLAY HERE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/they-buggin

Heartblob, our visual novel is finished! Play as Blobert the blobfish as he discovers the secrets of his small village and maybe even... love?

It's a bit buggy at the moment, but fully playable!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/heart-blob

Listen to the credit theme of Heart-Blob, our LD57 game!

I wrote the lyrics in about 5 minutes, recorded it as fast as I could (with only the default FL-plugins because I was working on a new PC), and mixed it while deaf in one ear from an ear infection. Truly, in the spirit of Ludum Dare!

https://soundcloud.com/user-117545847/hooked-through-the-lip-from-heart-blob

Hello everyone, Jungledorf here.

As the dedicated "sound guy" for our LD team, I figured ill share some tips and tricks for recording/producing sound effects, without bogging you down with the "nitty gritty" technical details.

1. You don't need a fancy microphone or gear

All the (non-synthized) sounds in our entry this year were recorded straight from my phone. All of the edits I made were done in FL studio, but that's only because I forgot to install Audacity on this PC (oops).

2. Record more than you need

Preferably way more. Need to record a door closing? Record yourself closing a door 10 times, you'll thank yourself later.

On top of giving you a lot of options to choose from, it also gives you the ability to have multiple samples of that sound effect in the game. "Footstep.ogg" might sound great, but if the player is hearing the exact same sample every 2 seconds, its going to get grating after a bit. You don't need to make a million different footstep sounds, but having 3-4 different samples play at random is going to make the player less likely to feel like they're hearing things over and over again.

3. LAYERING

all caps, because it's probably the best tip I've got. Say you've got a sound effect that's a metallic clank. You can add a lot of character to that sound effect by simply mixing something else in. Stack multiple different takes (another reason tip #2 is helpful) together and mix/pan them around, mix in a completely different sound effect (i.e. A stomp, or a metallic groan), or even take the exact same sample, and add effects onto it and mix it in to the original. Layering is what turns "guy kicking a trash can" into "robot landing on the ground".

4. The curse of knowing

Speaking of "guy kicking a trash can", you would be surprised what you can get away with. Remember, the player has no idea what you recorded, you do. What sounds like "obviously someone biting into a Pringle", becomes "a robot freezing" when presented to a player that just watched his robot walk into a block of ice. Especially with a little bit of editing. Don't immediately write off a sound effect for being "obviously wrong", until you put it into context.

5. Mind your transients

Or in English, your sound should start when it starts, and end when it ends. Sounds simple enough, but in the sleep deprived haze that is Ludum Dare, sometimes it's less obvious than it seems. If you have a "thunk" sound effect, you want the "thunk" to occur at the very beginning of the sample. A little bit of lead up to the sound can make things feel unresponsive.

On that note, "silence" is rarely silent. A tiny bit of background noise in the sample can feel like "silence" in your audio editing software, but it can become obvious when it suddenly "cuts out" at the end of the sample in-game. The old Minecraft PE "Ooh" damage noise is a great example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6KlyBV2lOI

For this reason, I usually add a little fade-out to most of the samples, even if I'm only fading out "silence".

6. Putting it all together

One last tip, mind your mixing. Again, obvious, but LD is the perfect storm to "burn out" your ears. Even following best practices, it's hard to make every single sound effect a consistent/appropriate volume for your game. Personally I suggest setting the volume of the samples inside the actual game engine/IDE itself (Most will have some way to do this, but I guess YMMV if you're one of those masochists doing LD in pure OpenGL and C or something). If time allows, give yourself a rest from working on the audio, and THEN do an actual in-game mix. Psychoacoustics are a pain in the neck, and you'll likely find that something is way to loud or quiet, even though it sounded perfect an hour ago.

Those are my 2 cents, feel free to ask me any questions in the comments, and I'll try to get back to you at some point with an answer.

And if you enjoyed this, found it helpful, or want to play a platformer where you control a robot using the most scuffed control scheme we could muster, give our game, Do-roidhicky a spin!

(assuming the embed works, otherwise, click the profile :) )