bumbleborn

update 4

5 Feb, 2023
4 minute read

Good mumble once again,

I managed to get some rough SFX and music into the game! It’s been a really positive experience and a massive morale boost on the project, it’s absurd how much more “real” a game feels with sound effects.

https://youtu.be/kie26hUhC-c

This week I’m gonna go into detail about how I’ve set up the audio in Wunderwurld. It’s not too fancy but it does get the job done, when we start production I will implement an proper sound effects engine like FMOD or WWise but for now…

What do I want to control when I play a sound effect?

What do I want to be in charge of and what do I want the game to take care of automatically?

For example, when I play a “Dig Dirt” sound I want it to choose between 3 different sounds at random, not choose the same sound consecutively and I ideally want this behaviour to be generic so it can apply to many SFX.

To solve this I created a SFX Data Scriptable Object (Scriptable Objects are just files that hold data), it can hold multiple sound files and you can set it to never repeat.

sfx.jpg

My SFX manager class makes it easy to feed these files in from across the project to play SFX with one line of code.

SFXManager.Instance.PlayOneShot(sfxDig, worldPos);

I have a separate system for handling SFX loops like pouring water from a watering can, then another to handle the ambient river loop, increasing and decreasing the volume of it based on the players distance to the water.

Finally the music manager tries to keep the music fresh by swapping between 2 types of music section, choosing a random loop each time. One from group A plays, then one from group B, then back to A. I’m gonna extend this with some more sections later with a calmer loop thrown in to break it up.

music-manager.webp

You can hear the slight differences between the loops below.

Group A

/assets/audio/WW - Day Theme - Loop A1.mp3

/assets/audio/WW - Day Theme - Loop A2.mp3

Group B

/assets/audio/WW - Day Theme - Loop B1.mp3

/assets/audio/WW - Day Theme - Loop B2.mp3

For the moment I make the music myself but I source most of the SFX from zapsplat.com, it’s only £30 a year so it works great for getting rough sounds. I edit them a little bit but it can still be hard to get cohesion, at a later date when I know all of the SFX in the game I’m going to do the Foley and sound design myself to keep a consistent vibe across the game.

I plan to do these kinds of game dev breakdowns a lot more so by all means, lemme know if there’s any aspect of the game that you wanna know more about!

What I did last week

Pretty good week to be honest, I managed to;

  • Implement SFX & Music.

  • Polish the Fishing Minigame so you can achieve a perfect catch now by never letting the target ring get away, Little star particles fly out at the end to show it and in the game this will likely increase the rarity of the catch a little bit and give the player a bit more XP if we end up adding experience points to the game.

  • Keep up with running, on 36 days in a run now!

  • We had First Friday at work! Basically we get the first friday of each month to invest our time into ourselves and our own projects, this enables personal development and growth.

  • Reviewed the current prototype to see how far away we are from a playable… it’s a bit far haha.

What I plan to do next week

I’ve said for the past few weeks that I’m gonna do a content sweep and add a bunch of the new sprites Emily has sent over but every time I touch a system in the game I immediately realise it’s not even ready for more content, which is good to realise but then I end up spending time on that instead of adding content.

I know what’s sorely lacking after the review so I’ll be focusing on creatures going forward. Mostly need to focus on;

  • The fanfare when a new one is unlocked

  • The process to make a visiting creature a resident

  • Their “Unfinished Business”, essentially their tasks you need to solve to help them move on.

  • Behaviour stuff, eating, sleeping, resting, getting angi, etc.

I don’t think all of this will be in by next week but I’m hoping to rework the fanfare and start on their behaviour.

Thanks for reading and see ya next weekend!