Since we first started Life Goes On, we knew the game would require a sense of humour. As we play with some of the common tropes in games, we wanted to poke fun at them and make gamers think about what they are doing and why they’re doing it. Keeping the experience light hearted and funny goes a long way with relaxing players into new routines. Incidentally, we’re also playing with some potentially serious subject matter, and that automatically gives the experience a darker edge. We set out to create an atmosphere that was cartoonish, fun, and straddled the line between what’s dark and what’s funny. Ian’s artistic style goes a long way to creating this atmosphere, but he can’t do it alone – that’s where I come in.


Along with the laundry list of other responsibilities I have on the project, I’m also the main sound designer and the one responsible for the audio experience of LGO. Sound goes a long way in creating a game's atmosphere and it’s something that needs to be noticeable, but at the same time not distracting. I could go on about the audio direction we decided to take with the project, but I’m going to focus on a single aspect of the experience, and one that the players of LGO are intimately familiar with, the death cry.

Players in LGO die a lot so the death cry from the knights as they meet their inevitable fate has to be memorable, but also subtle. We don’t want it to get too distracting or annoying. When we settled on the art style for our game, I tried to come up with a death sound that would make players laugh the first time they heard it, but fade away as they continued to hear it throughout the course of the game so it became just another indicator that their knight had met his or her unfortunate end. As it turns out, I’m a big fan of South Park, and they have some great death sounds that seemed to be remarkably similar to what I was going for. Using that as inspiration, I came up with some sounds that I felt fit the theme. For the sake of simplicity, the process I’m going to describe is for making a male death cry. I’m still making the female death sounds and discovering the best process for producing them.


The first thing that needs to be done when making a death sound for LGO is to start with some great source material. The first death sounds were made using my laptops internal microphone - this works great for death sounds made for a game that was completed in 54 hours, but it doesn’t work so well for a larger public release. Now I do my recordings on a Zoom H4N handy recorder. There are better microphones out there for doing voice work, and ideally you’d be doing them in a sound booth, but we’re limited by both budget and available equipment. The H4N is a great all-purpose microphone that features some pretty decent preamps, so for our purposes it works fine. I like to record in a 24-bit WAV file at 96000kHz so I can stretch and shrink the track as I feel like it and apply filters liberally without worrying about degradation in quality. When doing voice and foley recordings, I leave a gap of five to ten seconds between takes in order to get a clear image of the background noise so I can filter it out later.



Once the recordings are done, I import them into my audio editing suite. I use Audacity (because it’s free and open source), but Cubase is another program that I have experience with that works great. I pick a take from the source material and isolate it with the leading and trailing audio white space on a new track. Then, I apply a noise reduction filter using the audio profile of both white spaces (this requires applying the filter twice). Afterwards, I trim the recording so the white space is gone - this is important so there isn’t a delay between when an action happens on the screen and the sound is played (something Susan discovered the other day while making a placeholder sound effect).

The next step is to apply the filters to make the death cry sound more knightly. I like to change the pitch of the voice down by 15-25% to give it a deeper and resounding tone. Not that I don’t sound knightly on my own, but I feel this gives the knight a better sound for his personality. I either slow down the death sound or speed it up in order to make it the appropriate length. I’ve found that for our game, a death cry that’s about 0.5 to 0.75 seconds is the ideal length. It’s quick, immediate, and subtle. Next, I apply a compressor filter to bring out some of the more unique and hidden gems in the audio track. My field recordings are in stereo, so I apply a phaser filter and play with the settings to give it a more hollow sound. I’ll eventually bounce the track down to mono, so the back and forth of the phaser is removed, but we keep the subtle hollow effect that it adds. I then apply a small echo to the death cry, since it’s coming from within the knight’s helmet.



The last step is to bounce out the track to a WAV file so we can import it into the game. I combine the stereo tracks to a mono track, normalize the audio to peak at 0.0 dB, and then export an uncompressed WAV. The reason I normalize the track at 0.0 dB is so it isn’t too quiet when being played in game. You want to make sure players adjust the volume to their own taste. One of the most common complaints I received early on both internally and through play testing was my sounds were too quiet. As soon as I started normalizing the volume, when I bounced out the track the problem was solved. I also leave the sound uncompressed not only to preserve fidelity, but also because Unity recompresses audio files when they’re imported so I save the file from being double compressed.

This is a somewhat straightforward guide, but it’s a process that I’ve put together through trial and error. Each clip has its own unique quirks that you have to work out when you’re dealing with it, and honestly, the best way is through experimentation. There’s no secret to creating good voices or sound effects (at least not one that I’ve discovered, if you have I'd love to hear from you) – it’s just a lot of trial, error, and patience. You almost never get it right the first time, so don’t be frustrated if you have to go back and start over on a clip from scratch. It’s part of the process and one that is necessary to make great sounding effects. I’m by no means an expert, and I’m still learning and discovering things as I go along, but hopefully this helps aspiring sound designers starting out, or indie game developers who need to make their own effects.