Antics
These past two weeks I:
Finished the sounds related to the bucket
Started on ant sounds
1 ) Bucket
I made three more bucket sounds this week:
the bucket being damaged
the bucket being destroyed
sand being dug up
The first two were made using similar objects to the bucket placing sound: the plastic take-out container and the bag of sugar.
For the bucket being damaged, I hit the plastic container with my finger in various ways and then layered those with some heavier impacts from the bag of sugar.
For the bucket being destroyed I added some distortion and cascaded the hits in time so that it would sound like the bucket was cracking open. And once it cracks open, it should release all the sand inside, so I recorded myself pouring sugar and used that as the “sand spilling out of the bucket” sound.
The last sound, “sand being dug up,” isn’t directly related to the bucket, but I think it made sense to do it now. In the game you make your sand people gather sand from sand piles and return it to the bucket to be stored and used as a currency. So there needs to be a sound for when the people dig up the sand from the pile. I used a measuring cup and a bowl of sugar to mimic this.
2 ) Ants
For the ant — and really for all of the enemy creatures — I had to decide if they were going to be more realistic, or more exaggerated and monster-like. For this first go, I went on a more exaggerated route.
I recorded myself making gross shrieks and growls and all sorts of weird beastly noises and then added some formant shifting and distortion to reach the ant sound. I think depending on how large the ants are compared to the sand people, I may pitch the sound down a little, but for this I was imagining the ants were on the smaller side, and with more of a whiny henchman kind of tone.
The first three sounds in this demo are the death sounds. These are more drawn out and contain more squish, whereas the last three sounds are of the ant simply getting damaged. These are shorter (but could honestly be even shorter since I imagine you’re going to be hearing this sound a lot in-game) and don’t have as much squish.
I also made a demo walking sound and attacking sound, but these aren’t ready because I need to time them to the animation — which isn’t available to me yet.
I was pretty busy these past few weeks, so I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish. Even though it was not that much, I think the quality is still there. As always, thank you for reading!
Cover photo credit:
"Ant" by Bulldog Pottery - Bruce Gholson and Samantha Henne is licensed under CC BY 2.0.