Currently, my audio design is quite limited and simple. I am fine with that and I still need to get new music so I can put everything together. The jumping sound is finally in a place where I believe it won’t need any more adjusting. It isn’t too loud or too soft. My biggest issue with the previous iteration was the float value being negative. Since I was subtracting the land height from jump height if the player jumped onto something higher it would always return negative. At first, I just got the absolute value of that but it made it far too loud. Now I simply divide the value and any time the player jumps up onto something the sound value will be at 2.
While I added some new sound effects into the world some of them didn’t make any sense without visual effects. I put some particle systems where the sounds can be found. In the first stage, the rain sound I was using had low quality. I grabbed another one from the sound folder. It also had distant thunder in the track so that worked out well.
In the first stage, the entrance to the boss room was still bugged. I looked at what I had previously done and it was a mess. It was a bunch of boxes that did different checks to make sure the player could walk in and out without issue. To simplify everything I removed all but one box and then I teleported the player away from the door and played a cutscene. I now understand the importance of cutscenes to hide certain things behind the scene. This change guarantees the player cannot get stuck in the door which happened so often when I originally made the boss entrance.
The course taught me how to look at the attentuation radius of sound in the world. So I changed the range of the cannon on the fourth stage so it could be heard from farther and it also sounds more accurate. I’m not too worried about anything sounding realistic, as long as it sounds believable I am happy with that. Realism is difficult to capture and time-consuming to worry about.
I rearranged the barrels so it doesn’t look organized and I used the top-down camera view to get an interesting perspective of the level. It is so cool to see games behind the scenes even if it is my own creation. At the moment I don’t see other audio elements that I need to add. I will take the next online course and see where that takes me.
GoldenGratus Games 