Effe's Inn

My Journey into Sound Design

Posted on Thursday of October 11th, 2024
READING TIME 5:24

I’ve decided to create this one as I want to show you an example of how luck and a bit of desire can lead to something awesome!
I can also kinda consider this “project/hobby” has appeared to been a part of my coping mechanism from running away of anxiety,
which basically lead to something great, but let’s start from a bit earlier…

Random proposal?

I’m playing in a band, and our bass guitarist works as a full-time game visuals artist (and doing a lot of freelance stuff too).
Meanwhile doing music and going for casual weekly beers lol, I’ve heard a lot of stories regarding an interesting indie project called The Secret Ties Of Strandcliff.
So with some time passed I kinda knew about the team members, the roles and goals of the development team.
And once in a cold morning of late September I had a contact of team-lead with a proposal of “we need new sounds and composer!”
I tried to validate my anxiety levels to just reside life and work, not even considering to dive into a new opportunity (as well as proportional responsibility) in such an ambitious project.

First experience in “Sound Design”

Well, I’m visiting a therapist to at least just talk and to answer the right questions, so the situation with Anxiety was a bit better in November, 2024.
Aaaand I’ve decided that I will blame myself if not try to become a so-called sound designer and composer in an indie game.

So, at first, I’ve played the pre-pre-alpha build that team had and tried to understand the game.
There were almost no sounds at all (except some basic UI parts like menu buttons). And the game had an original OST for gameplay and menu,
these were demos of previous sound guy. These are actually good and I still like it and would like to reuse some day.

The next step was to understand which sounds are missing, so I came up with an idea to create a table with certain categories
which required certain sounds, and started to add it step-by-step.

The flow was super simple, I did what I supposed was right - I took freesound.org library sounds and just started to process these in my DAW,
with adding some FX and leveling out the volumes. Closer to December we had a pretty well-sounding game, at least I thought so considering my literally zero experience.

Composing

So, as I mentioned earlier, the project is ambitious, so it probably required a bit more of experience than “Hi there, I’m a dude that plays in a local bands for the last 10+ years”.

We had a specification for music, it should consist of certain instruments as the setting takes place in around 19-ish century, so obviously we do not need a sci-fi ambience, but we also do not need super classical stuff. It should be just good enough for the first phase, to not annoy the player and be pretty ambience-wise as well as having a melody which you would like to whistle when doing household chores. - can you even imagine this lol, look at me, I'm just a local rocker!

I’ve never worked with certain expectations previously, and only dealt with what I thought was “COOL ENOUGH TO PUT ON SOUNDCLOUD”. Here are some of my tries:

So, after this short but pretty extensive experience course from zero to “I have my sounds in game” has ended pretty quickly and we’ve decided to take a pause in development of this game for some period by certain reasons.

As the final experience for Strandcliff, I’ve designed (sound-wise) the intro scene, so this was kind of the cherry on the cake of my first ever experience in sound design/gamedev field.

Few months passed

On February 2024 we decided to make something feasible and small, and try to gather the experience of publishing our own game.
So we ended up with Feed The Gods idea.