Hi! I wrote last time, that Zeroes will be released during September. I counted days, during which I will be able to develop and realized with fright, that I have only two prolonged weekends until end of August. I created list of necessary features. I know, that release in time will be possible now. But it will not be, if I would have not completed music and sounds. I managed to do it during one weekend. But I can tell you, it was fight!
I have already added some sounds during summer, but it was necessary to add more sounds. Sounds add another layer of informations to player. There was also no music. Adding them seems easy at beginning. Search through databases of free sounds, choose some sound effects and put it into game.
The first problem come early. Many sounds and music are free for non-commercial projects only. It wouldn’t be problem if I knew, that Zeroes will be 100% free. I am still not sure, but it will be free probably. I just want to keep back doors open. Another problem was, that there are too many sound samples and a lot of them are low quality. It is literally like looking for needle in haystack. When you are choosing some picture, it is quite fast. You immediately see whole image. But this is not the case of sounds, no no. You have to listen ideally to whole sound to check, whether there is good part. And it tooks some time.
I ended up with very few sounds and no music after searching through free databases. Another solution was to create my own sounds. Great idea! But I have no capturing device. Phone and cheap microphone doesn’t count. Only one solution left, to open my wallet and buy music.
I have to say, that commercial databases were much more comfortable, faster and I founded suitable sounds almost immediately (not so immediately actually, but faster than on free databases). You can download sound for free with some voice over it, to try it in game. So you can get quite good image how it suits to game. So far so good.
I didn’t pay much attention to prices. What what a mistake! My main goal was to find most fitting music to Zeroes. I was looking for something funny, energetic but not much disturbing. I founded three music tracks, which I thing fits game very well. One is for each world. Great, let’s go buy them!
Price of sound effects was quite fair. About 1$ or 2$ for each. Problem was price of music. There my wallet really hurts! They wanted 40$ for the first two tracks and 18$ for the third one. But I decided, that it is better than to spend my money in pub or for cigarettes. And I will be showing this game to my grandchildren maybe one day 😀 . It showed up, that 40$ is without vat, so final price was 48$. Really great, I am thankful that I have summer job. But result is worth of it (at least for me)!
To implement sounds to game I used new Unity’s Audio Mixers. You can use it since version 5. It is quite easy to use and powerful. I used only volume changing and some high and low pass filters, but there is much more settings which I don’t fully understand. I can imagine, that some musician can do interesting stuff with it.
What lesson I get? I should get better not only at making graphic but also at creating sound. It can save money! Excuse me now, I’m going back to creating the game. You can meanwhile like new Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ZeroesGame or follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/er_mrk.