To match the style of our game, we decided the sound in this game will basically consist of real ambient sound and some synthesized sound effects and music.
For the recording part:
We have recorded some ambience sound in outdoors. Birds, insects, water.
Foley part:
Materials:
Dead leaves, dead flowers, ivy, soil, pipe, rice, tissue, crushed chili, tin foil, celery, bubble wrap, cornflakes, pill tin packaging, effervescent tablets, paper and paper box, electric toothbrush.
We used two kinds of microphones to compare the different recording effects, one is a dynamic microphone and the other is a condenser microphone.
Plant growing sound: for the tree growing from soil to ground sound, we used some fibers and twisting them. The sound of snapping celery is used as the seed crackling and drilling out of the soil.
Leave sound: We used some sounds of rubbing plastic as the sound effect of leaves shaking.
Fire sound: To simulate the big fire, I use a combination of the sound of rubbing tin foil, crushing crisps, twisting bubble wrap, breaking off celery and small size impact and whistling wind sound to create more layers of a fire. By adjusting their frequencies and proportion to achieve a balance.
Music part:
When making music, I decided to follow the storyline. When the tree is growing and at the experiencing stage, the music is soft and light. This style of music is designed to make players feel relaxed, because the scenes are also relatively healing. The second part of the music is for the fire part. When the tree is burns and gradually dies, the background music is a piece of tragic and sad melody. After that we will add some synthesizer sound effects according to the fire scene. The third part of music is used for the reborn part. Based on the principle of the “Wood Wide Web”. When a tree is dying, it passes its nutrients to other trees through its underground root system. So basically their cores are same. So the third music has the similar melody but with another instrument. The ending music is composed by piano and cello, also is a soft, relaxing major melody.
Code Part:
Many sound events follow the events in the unity scene, such as the sound of burning fire, raining , so most of the functions of playing sound are through “AkSoundEngine. PostEvent(“Event name”, gameObject) in C# inside the unity project.
RTPC in C#:
Because the change of our unity scene is not achieved by the timeline code, when using RTPC to change the ambient sound day and night, I cannot directly correspond the RTPC to time, so with the help of our tutor, we use “0” and “1 ” to correspond to “day” and “night” events.
VRController button sound:
We want to play the sound of the tree growing when the VR controller button is pressed, because pressing the button is the player’s own control of the growing process.
The code we used(But not worked, still not to debug):
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonDown(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Play_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonUp(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Stop_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}