Buttons & Buckets

These past two weeks I:

1. Finished the day and night beach ambiance

2. Designed button sounds

3. Drafted a bucket placing sound

1 ) Ambiance

For the day and night beach ambiances, I had to spread everything out into loop-able layers. I ended up with 5 layers in total:

1. wind & trees

2. day calm

3. day rough

4. night calm

5. night rough

The wind & trees would be the consistent bed between day and night. Then day calm would stack next. And then day rough would stack on top of day calm to add the rougher ocean waves. For the night scene it was a little different. The night rough replaces the night calm instead of stacking on top. This is because the night rough is so dense and stormy that you don’t need the calm playing underneath. It would be too much.

The hardest part of making these loops was making the loops believable. It was especially challenging with the seagulls, who are very dynamic and who like to have their own special unique moments. A loop will be noticeable if there is a specific landmark that you can identify each time it loops, and so I had to edit the seagull audio a ton to remove such landmarks.

As for the insects, I got rid of the grasshoppers for the day and introduced crickets for the night.

2 ) Buttons

I had three sounds to make:

• hover

• click

• error

I chose hand drums to be the sonic palette for my buttons to evoke the playful and more down-to-earth (literally) nature of the theming. I used congas and bongos. I think the real test is to see how they sound in-game. So until then, I think they work but I’m definitely open for revisions as these are very important sounds.

3 ) Bucket

For the bucket building, I had to make three sounds:

• placing the bucket

• damaging the bucket

• destroying the bucket

I only had time to make the placing the bucket sound this week, and I think it still needs a little tweaking, but sounds pretty good.

I used a plastic container I have along with some sugar to emulate the placing down of a bucket of sand:

For the “thud” part of the sound.

For the plastic-y, hollow, and sandy part of the sound.

All in all, a very productive week. Thanks for reading!