Amateur Foley Work and the Magic of Audacity
Some booze for our game about booze. Also part of our sound design!
I thought it would be interesting to talk about how I created the sound effects for our game, as I went the route of creating bespoke sound effects by using recordings of common household items!
Play our game here to hear the sounds for yourself first: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dwammings
Everything was recorded on an iPhone 12 and had the audio cleaned using the Audacity Noise Reduction effect (which is honestly straight up magic and works so amazingly well for a piece of free software!) and then edited together in Ableton Live
Drinking! As like so many of you out there, over the lockdown period I have amassed a collection of bottles of alcohol of varying shapes, sizes and amounts of liquid still left. We knew we were going to have a mechanic in our games where our dwarfs would drink from the very beginning so this is the first sound I created. The bottle of gin pictured above was used to create the cork being pulled out noise, and then I basically mashed all the other bottles of alcohol I have hidden together and edited them together with a nice bit of reverb.
Mining! This one was super simple, I have a set of reaaally thick set of Allen Keys (hex keys) and just picked lots of different sizes and hit them all together! With a little bit of pitch shifting and a healthy amount of reverb we get a pretty decent noise for mining
Digging Dirt! I was very tempted to go outside with a shovel and get the raw unfiltered sound of real digging and hard work. Unfortunately I don't think the iPhone microphone has enough resistance to deal with the tumultuous winds of Scotland, and frankly I was feeling lazy. To get this sound I just dug a really big spoon into a really big jar of sugar, trying to hit it as hard as possible to compress as much at once.
Placing Ropes & Building Kegs! I was able to re-use some recordings made for the mining sound, mixed with the calming sounds of me striking an old wooden broom that someone else is holding to get a nice sound for building.
Music! Bit less exciting, I used Synth 1 which is a really cool free synth which a bunch of presets that sound pretty decent out of the box. I spent about an hour trying to make a short loop that gave off both the vibe of "We are drunk dwarfs" and "These do be some spooky caves".
Thanks for reading if you got this far! I would love if you could play our game and let us know what you think of it!
