Final Major Project - Audio SFX

Audio is such an integral part of any game, if one of your senses isn't tuned into the game then you won't be immersed, so sound that is ingrained into the experience, elevates it and is high quality is absolutely required (Bycer, 2019). The sound of my game was definitely something I knew I wanted to absolutely nail in this project. In so many of my previous games I had left the audio until last which had resulted in many rushed aspects including complete lack of sound for certain things and sub-par sound for several others.

This commitment to have high quality audio meant adding sounds for almost everything possible. A sword swing, for example, I knew I would need a subtle whoosh sound for it swinging through the air, some kind of physical exertion sound from the player character and of course a sound for hitting the enemies. To allow me to have these sounds play at the correct time during animations I used an animation state behaviour script to play a type of audio selected from a drop down at a certain point in an animation. I used this method instead of animation events as animation can prove to be unreliable, especially at the end of animations where the transition to the next state can sometimes bypass the event.

Depending on the sound type selected from the drop down, the behaviour gets a random sound from the correct list of audio clips on an 'Audio Storage' script placed on the player. The random range of clips helps to make it seems more realistic and immersive as a player can very easily pick up on a repeating sound or sound pattern and that can take them out of the experience.

Sound for the enemies is done with the same method, with their own slightly different variants of the scripts that are more specific to them and their sounds. The enemies don't have a shield but to have a fireball for example, they have different requirements.

SFX moves beyond just the player and enemies though, small things like ambience are just as important even if it might not be immediately noticed. Wave sounds for being near the water, people talking in the town, opening, and closing a note, pick up items, placing them etc. there are so many things to consider and overall, I am very happy with how the SFX has turned out and the quality of the sounds I have sourced. I sourced some sounds from Freesound and I also purchased two sound pack from the Unity Asset Store; 'Medieval Combat Sounds' from Cafofo and 'Battle Screams Female Voice Pack' from PRINCIPLE Sound Design.