Synthesized Rain Patch for Rain On Their Parade!
Hello and congrats to everyone for making their games! I'm DonutShoes, sound designer from Moonlight Jammers who brought you Rain On Their Parade for this jam!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/rain-on-their-parade
https://moonlightjammers.itch.io/rain-on-their-parade
I wanted to do a little write-up on how I made the dynamic rain sounds for our little rain 'em up game. I used The Grid in Bitwig Studio and designed a patch that synthesized rain sounds of varying intensity.
There are 4 different layers in the sound. Firstly there's "Close Rain", this is meant to emulate the sound of drips and patter that you would hear right by your window or doorstep. For this layer, pink noise is being put through multiple chance modules to generate sporadic clicks and pops. That signal is going into a filter with fairly high resonance while the cutoff is being modulated by a random LFO.
The second layer is called "Light Rain", as the name suggests it's meant to sound like light rain but also at a distance that would range as far as, say, your yard or street in your immediate vicinity. For this, I took filtered white noise and pink noise and multiplied them together. This technique alone will get you a very convincing synthesized rain sound; by attenuating and filtering the signals you could also use this to generate vinyl crackle.
Next is "Heavy Rain", this is meant to sound like a torrential downpour of rain at a distance that ranges well into your neighborhood. Simple pink noise can be used to achieve this effect, but I used a module in the grid called AM/RM which is a blend of the pink noise being amplitude modulated and ring modulated by the white noise from the Light Rain patch.
Both light rain and heavy rain are then put into a blend module which is like a crossfade of two signals.
The 4th layer is called "Real Rain" and it's a sampler that is using real rain recordings. We have 3 levels in our game and I wanted each level's rain sounds to have their own "flavor" or distinct characteristics. By blending in different rain recordings by myself and @hunter-van-brocklin and altering some of the filters and attenuators on the other patches, I was able to deliver different sounding synthesized rain for each of our levels.
The last thing (and the best thing) in the patch is the "Rain-ify" knob. By modulating lots of different parameters in the patch at once, including filters, attenuators, gain knobs, and the Close Rain chance modules, this knob is the sauce that alters the rain intensity. At its lowest setting the patch sounds like a cozy, pleasant rainy day - at its maximum setting it sounds like a hurricane's at your doorstep.
To implement these sounds in the game, I recorded 3 rain loops for each level at different intensities, a light intensity, mid intensity, and heavy intensity. At the start of each level, all 3 loops play simultaneously. The rain intensity is mapped to the height position of the cloud, and we crossfade the loops as the cloud enters and exits different, overlapping height "zones".
To hear the results, please play our game!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/rain-on-their-parade
I hope everyone had a fun and stress-free Ludum Dare, this was my very first game jam and I'm already hooked!
