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[Maseo]

Hey everybody,

I'm a sound designer looking to make SFX specifically for game sound and I'm really keen to know what sort of sounds you guys need the most. Are there any particular sound sets that you find it really difficult to find / create sounds for (e.g. weapons, character movement, etc.)?

I'm hoping I might be able to help if there are

[SundownKid]

I can't seem to find many sounds for regular and A-A gun turrets. By that I mean, a heavy mounted machine gun, and a flak gun, WWII-style.

[Maseo]

Thanks SundownKid, I'll have a think about how I could synthesize those. Anybody else?

[McMutton]

I've been having issues figuring out how to do some of those cartoony ringy sword swinging sounds, kinda like the ones in Super Smash Bros, or the new Alice game.

[hyperduck]

You can use various thin metal to get a ping sound, take the inital attack off it, add a swoosh from a brush or broom or whatever to the start, and it gives you a swooshing sound with a inggggg to suggest it's a very sharp sword.

It's a basic way of thinking about it, obviously it would take more than just that to make it sound convincing and good, but you gotta start at some point, and from there you build it up to your own needs!

Recording hoses and other items like wooden baskets being swung/swooshed around is a useful idea too to get heavier, hollow sounds, it helps as part of the layering process to create a different size of sword, usually can be useful for heavier swords.

Hope that was of some use! If not, I apologise for wasting your time 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it's hard to find recordings of certain exotic phenomena. for instance, whirlpools. i don't like synthesized stuff so i had to wind up using a recording of a river rapids for a whirlpool, which sounds somewhat similar but doesn't sound like a true whirlpool. of course it may not be possible for you to record a real whirlpool (it requires huge amounts of water) but i'm just saying what i need most

it's also hard to find recordings of ambient nature sounds *without* cars or planes or people talking in the background. i know those are hard to record too, since noise is everywhere, but most nature recordings i find have some form of noise pollution in them, often unnoticed and unlabeled, which makes them unusable games where you want background nature sounds but don't want cars and planes and stuff in those sounds

[Maseo]

McMutton - I've been playing around with some motion sounds and reverbs, will upload a few samples once I'm happy with them.

Mecha - some great ideas there; I'm taking more of a synthesised route atm, but have considered field recording these if I can't get them quite right any other way.

Paul - yes, i have that problem: it's very hard to do proper field recording (of a decent number of minutes) of those types of sounds unless you go far out into the wilderness. I have some shorter pieces of atmos (edited to remove bleed from humans/vehicles) but what would you consider to be a usable length (time) for a looped background atmospheric nature sound?

Thanks for your feedback everyone.  I'm also interested in knowing more about what formats you guys like to use: do you start at 48k PCM wav and then convert to MP3 / ogg?