"Player & Enemy Sounds"

Author: Andres Gutierrez

A big problem for our game was that there was a significant lack of sound. The only sound to be heard were the background music ones assigned to different maps. This made the player experience feel empty and lacking of feedback. When characters move and take actions they should provide that audio feedback and not just the visual feedback. During the process of adding more audio I slowly noticed how much more enjoyable the gameplay experience felt simply by hearing these character's actions. Not only that, but the only audio that was available involved the 2D screen space rather than listening based off the 3D world the game is set in.

To help fix this problem, I was able to sound audio for the following characters and objects:

• Player Character
  • Footsteps
  • Sword swing
  • hit
  • death
  • jump
  • dash
  • Low health
  • Low stamina
• Base Enemy
  • Footsteps
  • Hit
  • Death
  • Weapon swing
  • Spot player
• Fire/Lightning spells
  • Cast
  • Impact

After adding this list of audios to the game, it started to feel more vibrant and the experience rose up significantly. Before, the gameplay felt dull, but now it has been given more life. To handle the issue of the only sounds being in a 2D space, I created an Attenuation and configured its settings to make the sound appear in a 3D space depending on the position of the listening player. These settings involved making the sounds have a falloff distance where the sounds will appear quieter the further the player is from the source. If an enemy spots or attacks the player with their backs turned, now they will be given audio warning rather than waiting to be hit from behind which wouldn't make much sense realistically. After adding sounds to the enemy first I was able to start adding more sounds to other actors in the levels easier since I had the groundwork setup for me. For now most of the sounds are acting as placeholders and I am excited to start adding new sounds and replacing these for even greater ones.