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My task was to increase the atmosphere of the image by making sound effects that fit the setting. Erik had the idea of the piñata observing the city where the game takes place from a distance, and that the menu would be a calm break from the rest of the game, which is pretty hectic.

Together we came up with a sound consisting of a smooth wind, crickets chirping and the distant noise of the festival celebrations.

 

I started out by searching for royalty free sounds on the internet. For the unaware, royalty free sound basicaly means you are allowed to use whatever file is royalty free - the creator does not demand any form of payment or credit for it.

Once I had three sounds I was happy with (crickets chirping, a wind and the alarm of a crowd of football supporters moving through a city) I opened up Audacity.

Audacity is a simple, yet effective sound editing program that has been around for quite a few years. It is also free, which makes it irreplacable. While I've had it installed for quite some time, this was the first time I actually used it, so a lot of time was spent on google.

 

The plan was to edit all of the sounds (especially the crowd) so that they fit together with the requested setting, and then merge them together to a single file. Noteworthy is that it had to be loopable since the player may stay in the menu for as long as he or she wants.

 

 

I began with the wind, as I had encountered a problem with it as soon as I presented it to Erik: He didn't like it. Apart from the sound of a calmy breezing wind, the file also contained the squeals of geese. While I intially thought the geese increased the feeling of being out on the countyside, Erik pointed out that on certain parts the geese's quacks were a bit too intense, which created a humorous effect contrary to what we strived to achieve.

I agreed and decided to cut out the parts with the geese - left was nothing but the breezing wind.

 

This file was easy to fit into the loop - the file had little to no background noise at all, and the chirping of crickets is already a very repetive sound effect. All I did here was to time the pause in between two "chirps" and place that pause at the end of the sound file's duration: this made the loop very believeable, as there was no sudden cut or fade in/fade out effect at the end of each loop.

 

The main task here was to make it sound distant; the main menu is set in the jungle outside the city, and thus the sound of the festival should sound a bit muffled, and far away.

Now, I knew from the beginning that his was going to be a problem - but I also thought that help would easier to find than it actually was. Googling for tips and tutorials didn't give much as my crowd sound was a lot different from the examples I found.

Whenever you apply effects that lowered the sound in one way or another, the high pitched sound are always the last ones to die out - which in my case was the sound of vuvuzelas.

On top of that, the effects I used didn't quite catch the "far away effect", it just muffled the sound. At the best, my file sounded like a bunch of trains in the adjucant room.

 

I tried instead to use the music that we use in the game, with much better results. Not only was the gap between high pitched and the average tones smaller, but I also got the tip to add an echo effect, which instantly made the music sound like it was played over a large area - in this case the valley the city is located in.

 

After that I didn't encounter any more real problems. I spent some more time further polishing the different components to make them sound more natural, but this was all mindless boogling with details that didn't require much effort.

Although the sound are still far from finished, it will be present in the beta if our programmers find time to implement it.