Hey just a heads up that the video linked has audio/visual syncing problems. The sound effects line up a lot better in game, I swear.
This week I fiddled around with adding audio to my game project. ...Which was not as easy as I first thought. Anywho;
- Added in the ability to crossfade music tracks, based on what part of the screen the player is looking at. In the above video, the supermarket music plays when the player is on the "safer" part of the screen or talking to the employee at the desk, before fading out to ominous ambiance when approaching the actually-dangerous freezer.
- There's no limit to how many of these location-sensitive tracks can be on the screen at a time. Perhaps this could be used for audio puzzles? Like a (figurative) metal detector. Or perhaps it could be tied to a character's location, so if the room goes completely pitch-black you can still hear where the monster is.
- Definitely gonna see if I can tie audio cues into gameplay a bit more.
- (Oh, and music/ambiance tracks auto-crossfade when moving between rooms. But that's just default engine stuff. Nothing to get excited about, though there's ways to exploit this too. Suddenly stopping the music to indicate a harsh shift in tone, playing multiple tracks over each other if you want to make a sensory mess...)
- Also added in simple character-specific bloops for when someone is talking out loud. It got super annoying when it played after every single letter, so I've tweaked it to play after every sixth. (This is the kind of coding feature that only nerds would get excited about. Yeehaw.)
- I like the idea of adding in emotional variations on these bloops; higher-pitch for excitement or fear, lower-pitch for sarcasm or annoyance, etc etc. (For a loose example of this, see the cutscenes from the game Celeste.)
- Is there more I could be doing with dialog sounds...? I don't think I can afford actual voice actors for the game, but maybe there's a way to get creative here...
- Also it's not shown off here, but bloops can be disabled through the game's option menu. Because they're only fun when they're optional.
--- Audio Credits: ---
Screen Saver by Kevin MacLeod (of course)
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5715-screen-saver
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Notification (8-Bit) 2 by AndreWharn
Link: https://freesound.org/people/AndreWharn/sounds/501211/
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Ambiant 1 by TheFrohman
Link: https://freesound.org/people/TheFrohman/sounds/206043/
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/