And so my first day working as a sound designer for Plagued has begun. Today I realized just how much work it’s going to take on my side if I want to deliver a half decent product. For those of you who don’t know, game audio requires hundreds and thousands of audio files to work together to create a realistic audio environment, in-game.
Today, I started knocking out what most would think is the most basic sound effect in a game: footsteps. You can’t just take a sound clip of a guy walking, drop it into some code, loop it and call it a day. Just about anyone will pick up on the same sound clip being looped. You need to create at least 5 different versions of one foot step and then randomize them so it’s a little harder to pick up patterns. After that, you’ve got to take different terrains into consideration. Is it concrete? Gravel? Grass? A puddle? A swamp? What kind of shoes is the character going to wear? How fast is the character moving? The thought alone made me start thinking about how much more complex other sounds will prove to be in the future but it got me more excited than intimidated.
So far, I’ve got 35 audio files for walking and running on only 4 different terrains. It’s tedious but fun work to me. The only really scary part about the whole thing is presenting it to the team and having them want you to start over from scratch. We’ll see how things turn out by the end of the week.
