Hey Indies,

One thing that my LD 22 entry (and most games I make) lack is sound.  I have little to no experience making sound, so I wanted to get some feedback from the community about how indies either prepare or gather sound effects for their games.  Right now, my “option of choice” is to go to Freesound.org and play with sounds for ~1 hour until I find the ideal one I want to use (for 1 sound clip), and it takes forever, and sometimes the sound I want isn’t there!

I did notice the LD team was awesome and posted a bunch of tools here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tools/ for us to use, which is cool, but I had a few questions for the community.  Answer as few or as many as you’d like!

Do you use LD’s recommended tools?  Are they any good?
Do you outsource your sound generation (can’t for LD-comp) to someone else?  Do you pay them?
Do you use any other tools to generate sound?  Free vs. Low-Cost?
Do you make your own music?
Finally, do you use any reliable royalty-free sites to pull music and sound from? (is that legal for LD?)

Thanks for sharing!
Josh

Voicebox is a very simple HTML example for RPG games that require voiceover dialogue. Instead of carefully recording all of your game’s speech, certain characters can be assigned an “alien tongue” that is made up of simple nonsense sounds. Much like in the original KOTOR adventure game by Bioware, important characters can be given proper English voiceovers while secondary characters or those you don’t have time to record dialogue for can simply play random snippets of silly “fake” speech like these. Believe it or not I recorded these myself using a microphone (in between bouts of laughter). Feel free to use these recordings in your game. Enjoy!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/voicebox-mp3/

LD20 mailman progress – zombies moving and sound from Hamilton Lima on Vimeo.

ha ! zombies moving around in the city, soundtrack playing, each different type of zombie with his different sound ! hahahah I love zombies !!!

next step check zombies colision with the walls and with the main char

I’ve finished plugging in a bunch of sound effects for Angry Caverns and you can hear and play the result here (Flash)

Now I’m off to use Reason to compose a quick main menu loop and at least one level loop…

Then it will be time to generate some more levels than 1  !

EDIT: If anyone plays and the sounds are too loud / soft / annoying.. feel free to let me know!  Thanks 

Anyone notice this yet ? jSfxr: a Java applet by eigenbom, inspired by Dr Petter’s sfxr.

This could turn out to be a handy tool for those last minute sound effects (although for me, sfxr does just nicely) .. except it seems to lack a save-to-WAV function …

I put up an article on basic sound synthesis yesterday. It had been requested by some folks. Touches on fundamental aspects of sound in general as well as more specific details relevant to classic retro waveforms and the kind of stuff sfxr does.

Thank to DrPetter’s sfxr app I managed to get a decent heli sound. After wrestling the XNA sound app, I got it to pitch with the heli’s thrust value. I got rid of the polygon objects and focus now on rectangles. perhaps I need some springs… hmm. Oh and I got to get some gameplay, important that one. Anyways I gotta catch a train, there is a x-mas “smorgasbord” waiting for me 110km south… ta ta!

I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!

Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz

Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.

Been tinkering with this over the last couple of days.

EDIT: Official sfxr homepage – http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

As the audio geek I am, I find it a bit unfortunate that most LD48 entries are usually silent. I figure it’s probably due to the authors not having a quick ‘n’ easy application at hand for making sound effects and therefore neglecting that aspect of the game in favor of code and, usually, graphics. Even simple sound effects can add a huge amount of immersion and fun to a game, though.

What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects… or something along those lines. It’s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files for playback using most game/media libraries like SDL or pygame.

Basic usage involves clicking the left-most buttons to automatically generate random sounds loosely targeted at certain categories. For more advanced users it’s possible to spend some additional time to manually create fairly varied and interesting sound effects.

The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don’t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.

Hopefully this will mean that there’s no longer any valid excuse for anyone to get N/A in sound!

Download: sfxr.zip (win32, 48 kB) – Latest update: 2007-12-15 (see screenshot)

EDIT: Apparently it sort of works in wine 0.9.50, though with some stability issues. Fortunately though, the good Gerry JJ/mjau managed to port it properly. Here’s a copy of his post:

I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!

Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz

Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.

Source code is obviously included in the portable archive, and anyone is free to use or modify it for anything they please. There’s no need to credit me, although it would be nice if you did. I would also appreciate a little email note if you do create something cool based on my code.

If I get around to making a little update I’ll include source code in the win32 archive as well.