Sound Effects
From Damasca
Contents |
Overview
The goal of any project's sound design is to provide a unique, enjoyable and ultimately immersive experience that enhances the other areas of the project. While sound is not the most important of elements in game design, good sound design adds a significant amount of value to a game project.
Damasca's sound design, while inhibited by a lack of a recording studio or access to professional sound sets, is fuelled by a will to succeed and general home-grown talent.
Effects Libraries
Damasca will, if necessary, make use of available free/creative commons libraries of sound effects when such sound effects suits its needs. If effective pre-made sound effects cannot be acquired, the team will attempt to create its own. This poses a slight problem with more dramatic sound effects, and most likely will be either synthesized, or have to be heavily filtered to sound proper.
Technical
Damasca's sound effects will be recorded as 44.1KHz/Stereo or Mono, depending on the nature of the sound effect, and will be saved as either MP3 format or ADPCM format, depending upon the amount of overhead required for MP3 playback for such small samples. This is important to consider, since overhead in processing sound effects means that sounds may be delayed or cause lag in-game, which could pose a very real threat to gameplay.
ADPCM, however, is generally very light to decompress, and is used extensively, for example, in PlayStation 2 games. The only disadvantage to ADPCM is that its compression ratio is less than optimal, which means that file sizes may be larger than desired. This poses a threat to 56k interoperability, and thus will be finalized as soon as possible.
Sound effects that will have to be generated can be done in a number of ways, including falling back to MIDI. Whatever the case, massive manipulation will be necessary to achieve acceptable quality and uniqueness.
When Do Effects Occur?
There should be at least one sound effect for every action that a player can make, preferably with variations thereof, such as different sounds when a sword is being swung. Ambient sounds will be playing at all times, though not loudly or sharply enough to really overshadow anything else, and these sorts of sounds will be recorded and manipulated by our staff. Other sounds include footsteps, jumping, and so on. Generic voices, such as grunts and shouts/yells will also be triggered by certain events, and will, again, be recorded by our own staff.
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