Adding Sound
- FraserJamesH
- May 16, 2020
- 2 min read
I find sound to be one of the most challenging aspects when it comes to making a game as I have no knowledge or experience in how to make music or sound. I know how to record sound and have a decent microphone to do so but no clue on how to use audio software beyond very simple changes to MP3s. This leaves me at the hands of websites online and seen as I don't have the budget to spend, this cuts my options in half. However, there are some good websites out there that offer free audio to use with attribution, the main downside is finding these places. Here are a couple I found:
I also recorded a few of my sounds using the Blue Snowball microphone and Audacity. Recording my own sound came in handy for things like NPCs as they are custom and cant really be found online.
Once I had my raw audio files, I edited where I needed in Audacity and then imported all the MP3 files into Unity. Sound can eat up your storage fast due to many tracks being minutes long and ranging from a couple to hundreds of Megabytes. To help cut down on this you can change the audio import settings and drastically reduce the storage space that the audio files are using. To find out more information on this check out this article that covers what import settings you should use for different types of sounds.
Unity comes with a few audio filters by default and can come in handy when wanting to change the audio files in game and not necessarily the actual MP3 file. I used the high pass filter for example in conjunction with 3D sound to create the radios in game that sound tinny and fade when you get too far away from them. Audio reverb zones are also a great way to get more out of your sound without any editing in audio software. The main instance I had in this game was for the cave, originally I was going to add some cave sounds and edit them in a way to make them sound like an echoing cave. But, once I found out about reverb zones I instead placed one in the cave (and set the mode to cave) and whala, the cave sounded great. There is a whole bunch of settings to play around and I ended up using a few elsewhere around the environment to help with creating more interesting sound.
Comments