Sound Effects!

Tonight’s update has been a long time coming; sound effects! Pat and I took some time last weekend to bring a microphone around the house and record various doors opening, water pouring, and other odds and ends, and tonight I poured over Audacity isolating samples, boosting them to a proper volume, and then importing them into the game.

To be honest, it wasn’t as hard as I thought.

As far as Godot goes, the only real issue I ran into was for PickupItem sound effects; they previously removed themselves from the scene on pickup, but that also removed their AudioStreamPlayer, meaning their sound effect would play, but immediately the player would be removed. It was somewhat perplexing, but after a while scratching my head I realized what was wrong, and now PickupItems only hide themselves upon collection (which is effectively the same).

I think the most eye-opening thing was how sounds that were recorded in one context (a physical object doing something) can easily be given an entirely different life in a new context; for example, the door opening sounds I’d intended for the dresser in the bedroom just didn’t sound right, and using the squeaker kitchen cabinet samples just felt better - even though the original samples were basically the same sort of furniture! For the next round of effects, I’m going to try to think more creatively about what can produce the type of sound I want, instead of trying to capture literally the sound a specific object makes.