Take a look at Audio Design | Crystalled Bullets - Dev Diary

This is the English transcript of "When the Audio Speaks in Game" adjusted as an Itchio article.

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So, There's a new design for Snake Mole. It meant to be a female Zombie at an earlier stage of the game development, but as development progressed, she became less about a zombie and more of its own. Another thing is, I made it's look to be gender-neutral. So, There's no need to make multiple variants do the same job but different looks like male and female. Furthermore, I implemented a dedicated melee attack for that enemy besides this creature's puke attack. I think it makes the game's combat more exciting, and challenging, and it serves another purpose to combat mechanics work, but for now. I explain that detail later.

Anyway, I think it's good timing to talk about the Sound Design of my game. Sounds in games play a significant role in games. If it didn't, no one probably talked about sound chips like SID in Commdore64 or Paula in Amiga PCs to this day. Unless about its silly name. Some sounds directly affect the overall feel of the entire game to the player, and Some sounds are required to notify something to the player to avoid upcoming danger or treasure.

So, Let's talk about the ingenuity of the sound design of my game, The Crystalled Bullets. I was talking about this topic a bit when I talked about Gun Designs a while back. So, let's dig into this topic further in this video.

As I mentioned before, Crystalled Bullets' Guns firing sounds come from a heavy mix of stock sound effects from Japanese free stock sound websites to the CC0 Sound Effects from a Website hosted by an English Language website.

From here, I'll talk about the further details I didn't in the past. As for Reload sounds, Crystal Pistol, or I'd like to call it from here now, "FlameBang" and Crystal SMG, "RapidFrost" reload sounds come from Handgun and M4Rifle Model guns that lie around in my house. Because these guns' structure isn't much different from Real-life Guns, I could use them as a source of sounds. But my Shotgun, "PoisonShot" reload sound required another method to make the sound effects. Because It had vastly different reload mechanics from the model guns in my house. So, I took a completely different approach. First, I took several sounds like Door opening/closing sounds, Sound of Rock Hits, etc. Second, I took those sounds and arranged them with a higher pitch and faster playing speed to fit PoisonShot's reload sound.

I think it turned out nice enough. It sounds good enough to be satisfying to reload. But it feels a bit lacking in believability as the reload sounds of the gun. So I think there's still some work left for polish.

So it is time to move on from gun sound design and talk about the sound design of combat in general.

Firstly, the Sound of Hitmarkers. I wanted to Hitmarker sounds to be very punchy, satisfying, and original to hear. (I think some people talked about the importance of Good Hitmarker Sound in the past.) For originality, PS3-era CoD Game-like click sounds were the thing I wanted to avoid. One day, for some reason, I came up with the idea of wearing an Oculus Quest 2 headset, punching myself on the head, and recording it through a Quest 2 microphone, multiple times. It turned out to be a surprisingly good sound for Hitmarker. Some of the records were also usable to notify the kill sound.

Secondly, Special Attack sound. In Crystalled Bullets, there's a two-way that the enemy is to attack. Normal Attack: Weak one from an enemy that injury hardly becomes critical. Special Attack: very effective attack from an enemy that you should avoid, but if you shoot them during that attack, you can crystalize them. So yeah, that's a risk-and-reward thing you might expect from the usual game design document. To notify Special Attack to the player, not only with a visual but by creating an audio notification of "cha-kin!" by mixing sounds of a sword unsheathed and stock sound effect of shine onomatopoeia. From my experience, the player is better at reflection when there's a sound on the enemy. At least for me anyway.

 I remember I struggled with parrying in God of War 2018, a game with only a visual notification. Meanwhile, I had no problem with games like Hi-Fi Rush and Furi, which offered visual AND audio notifications.

Speaking of Special Attack, I could dig into those combat mechanics. I've already written a 1500+ word Transcript of that dev diary talking about unique combat mechanics that talked about. But As I wrote mechanics influention (influence) to bad FPS design examples, the terrible games I despise, the relationships with your mom, the script went all over the place! So, yeah. It requires more time to cook to become a half-decent script. So, I wouldn't be embarrassed to post on the internet.

Go back to the topic of Sound design. There are still some problems with the enemy itself. As for human enemies, I only gave a free stock sound of screams. It's all fine and serviceable. But the problem is creatures like them. I can't find appropriate stock sounds for them, nor do I have any idea how to mix the stock sounds I have access to. I could give a voice to them by myself. And I did. The result wasn't pretty. (If you want to check that out, join the game's discord server, or wait a few weeks then so you can see it from this Twitter account. so don't forget to follow it, you lazy Susan!) So I wish there was any voice actor that does creature voices like them.

Another problem arises when there's a need for the protagonist. Villy. The same could be said for other characters like Aconne or Crocca who are a main-side kick of this game. Things like stock sound effects, and AI Voices aren't good enough to convey information to players during the gameplay as they hurt and certain attacks are ready without sounds getting overwhelming.

It's difficult to find a voice actor for a character like them. Voice actors of human characters in Crystalled Bullets need to be Japanese people. One for its anime art style, but most importantly, I have no confidence in the instructing acting of foreign voice actors when I, a developer am Japanese.

I don't want to give him the voice of myself. Unless for placeholder sake. I'm older than him and have no common with him. He is not a projection of myself. Unlike Max Payne was Sam Lake's projection. If I had to make an appearance in a game, NPC, or I don't know. Sandbag for the player to punch.

Afterwords: I could have posted this Dev Diary earlier if I wasn't busy with other events and stuff in real life, and I didn't have to others using my Main PC. That's why this audio design video has a different record quality than other videos. Ironically.

Anyway, As a Japanese person, sometimes I struggle to understand at writing technique of English. like rhyme in English. Let me give it a shot, "Anyone who pretends to attitude as he knows, deserves to shove a fork at their nose"