🔊 About Audio 🔊
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
Goals
We wanted our game audio to:
- Capture the feeling of going on a grand adventure
- Create an uplifting, active atmosphere
- Avoid being jarring or distracting from gameplay
We initially planned to have four audio tracks for the game:
- The Great Hall
- The Cellar
- Boss Encounter
- Main Theme
Inspirations
We had a few key inspirations for audio. Our audio was mainly inspired by Stardew Valley, Lil Gator Game, and Celeste.
We used the following songs from these games as inspiration for each track:
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The Great Hall
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Creak Winds - Lil Gator Game Creek
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The Cellar and Boss Encounter
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Marimba of Frozen Bones - Stardew Valley
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Resurrections - Celeste
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Forest Winds - Lil Gator Game
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Main Theme
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Stardew Valley Overture - Stardew Valley
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For sound effects, our general purpose sound effects and beep speech were inspired by Lil Gator Game. Our ambiance and footstep sound effects were inspired by Stardew Valley.
General Process
For all audio, we found free sound effects to use as placeholders so we could implement them into the game engine. We did this so we could swap out the audio file once we found final versions without needing to do any new implementation.
We created and followed a strict pipeline for getting audio assets into the engine. This included details for editing the sounds and using proper naming conventions.
Read more about our audio pipeline here: Audio Bible
SFX Process
We divided SFX into several categories: General SFX, Ambience, Footsteps, and Beep Speech.
For these sounds, we sourced free assets (CC0) from freesound.org, then processed the sounds in Audacity or Reaper, before importing them into the engine.
We tasked our contractors with finding, editing, and importing final SFX assets into the game.
Music Process
In general, our music process started with creating a melody and bassline and following up by creating a matching chord progression and percussion line. We created slight variations of some tracks to use as B sections, giving the music variety to not bore the listener. These variations followed the same process.
To make each track we used basic instruments that roughly estimated the sound we were aiming for using the free Spitfire LABS plugin. Once the song was finished we used the Kontakt 8 plugin to pick out final instruments for the track.
References and Tutorials
- How to Compose Video Game Music Fast for Indie Developers
- A Guide to Making Video Game Music
- How to Write Drum Parts (for non drummers)
- How to Easily Compose Medieval Music (Using the Dorian Scale)
- 7 Steps To Writing GREAT Basslines
Here are two of the songs we composed for Leaves of Fate! The Great Hall and the Cellar and pictures of the Reaper Files for each of these songs.
Great Hall Music
Great Hall - Original
Image of the Great Hall Music Reaper File
Cellar Music
Cellar - Original
Image of the Cellar Music Reaper File
Lesson 1: Don't forget Audio!
From other projects, we know audio is often neglected until the later stages of production, which can lead to underdeveloped products and a lack of player feedback. We wanted to address audio early by finding and implementing placeholder sounds before finding final assets, which worked well for us.
Audio Bible
Want to see even more about audio? Check out the Audio Bible below for more details.