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[Pixel Noise]

As title says! Check out some of the SFX we are putting together for Dusters. These are a few effects during the building portion of the game (the player base).

These are just the raw sounds we've put together so far. No fx at all on them (EQ, etc) yet. Feedback/suggestions welcome!

https://soundcloud.com/pixel-noise/sets/dusters-sfx/s-86Hho

Thanks!

[Jasmine]

The link is broken? D:

Also, do you have any game footage? Outside of processing/eq'ing tips, it could also help us with critique if we knew the environment/setting the sfxs are being placed in.

[Barendhoff]

The link doesn't work indeed. Perhaps you've tried to share a private Soundcloud page? If so, you'll want to use the sharing option instead of copy-pasting the url!

[Pixel Noise]

Ugh, thanks for the heads up. Pulled the wrong link. Edited - and here it is again - https://soundcloud.com/pixel-noise/sets/dusters-sfx/s-86Hho

And sorry - no gameplay footage yet. There was an alpha build out, but I think he took it down for now. (solo dev, and he also just had his first kid, so progress is slow right now)

[MoritzPGKatz]

Hey,

Hard, if not impossible, to give any good feedback without context!

Only thing I noticed is that there's a lot of low-frequency noise in the first scribbling sound.
Since that sound doesn't have much information in the bass frequencies, I'd apply a generous high-pass filter on that to get rid of most of that hum.

Same thing might do for the "ping" sound in the "Construction Complete" sound. Perhaps you'll find that this needs an even higher-pitched sound altogether so it'll cut through the music. Again, hard to say without context.


Cheers,
Moritz

[Breakdown Epiphanies]

Only thing I noticed is that there's a lot of low-frequency noise in the first scribbling sound.
Since that sound doesn't have much information in the bass frequencies, I'd apply a generous high-pass filter on that to get rid of most of that hum.

+1 on this!

I find it difficult to give good feedback as the obvious thing would be "do some EQing and maybe try some compression to make it cut through the music and/or soundscape, play around with some early reflections/room if the game's engine does not do the room placement for you". I would like to give it another listen after you did some basic processing. Basically I like what I hear. For the moment I enjoyed the scribbling in the first example the most. Could be that the drill sound in the "construction" samples gets annoying if it occurs too often during gameplay but some context would be needed to evaluate that better.

[Pixel Noise]

Actually this is exactly the kind of feedback we were looking for right now - sorry we don't have much context. We could explain it - but we'll just wait till there's better gameplay footage available. But we wanted to just put out these base sounds, before we went any further, to see what people thought of them in terms of base sounds. So comments like "you need to EQ this or that" are still useful right now. SFX are a new bag for us.

[TonyManfredonia]

I agree with the above.  Using EQ can really give SFX a cleaner sound.  Also, if you end up doing a lot of Foley/recording, think about using a Gate processor/plug-in as well!  That'll take care of a lot of unnecessary ambient noise.

[Barendhoff]

In addition to the useful comments above, consider 3D functionality. There are two sparkish sounds at the start of 'Power Activated', one hard-panned to the left, the other to the right. Panning to the extremes can cause some confusion in a 3D game environment, as a sound suddenly might not seem to appear from where its source is. It's largely an implementation thing, but you'll want to have your sounds dovetail into whatever environment is set up--which you very well may have done, in which case this paragraph can be disregarded.

As Breakdown already touched on above, the drill sound in the 'construction' samples might become rather annoying if the sound occurs often. Perhaps it helps to use short bursts of drilling instead of the current 3 to 4 second long drill. Such as in this video, for example.

Finally, consider the length of the sound effects. Can players rapidly repeat the actions that should (re)trigger the sound? If so, you may want to shorten the duration of the sound effects. Remember Age of Empires? Players could play bongo's if they kept reselecting a house building (dum-dum-dum!), which was really cool. What wasn't as cool was the cacophony you unleashed if you would do that with the barracks: the 'select barracks' sound took too long to finish so you ended up with aural chaos. Not really the audio team's fault, but it's nice to be forgiving to typical gaming behaviour. Players like to try to break the game, after all.

Having said all that, as far as I can tell without seeing gameplay context, the sounds are pretty nice! I really like the 'Power Activated' sound; it's buzzing with power but not at all intrusive to the ears. Nicely done. :D

[Pixel Noise]

Thanks!

To give a bit more context - none of these actions occur frequently - so were not worried about spamming them/overlapping sounds. The "Construction Started" sound has been the one I was least happy with - I think I'll try to shorten the drilling sounds, as suggested.

Appreciate the feedback!