This post will be about the various sounds that I’ve edited and implemented into Snofyr.

Snofyr is using a modified version of a sound manager developed by Phil Oterdahl. The software’s primary strength is within adding and playing a large amount of sounds within a single gameobject. A machine gun fire sound, for example, works great for this. However, for playing single pieces of sound (like the background music), it was far simpler just to have an audiosource loop the song in the inspector. This is due to the rigidity of the way the function stores the sounds and calls them.

Music

Snofyr uses two songs: Mileva Rachenitsa by Frifon Tifonov a Bulgarian wedding song, and this example of Swedish folk music being played on a nyckelharpa, a traditional swedish instrument.

There was a few things I had to do to use these songs before adding them into the game. Firstly, the ending of Mileva was cut off, presumably because of my third world internet usage.

In addition, this song is the main theme for the gameplay, so it had to have the ability to loop. To do this, I removed the silence at the start of the clip, then I selected the first 5 seconds of the clip, ensured that both ends of the selection were at the zero point, then cut the selection and pasted it at the end of the track.

Now I had to cross fade the audio. While there were functionalities for doing this in a complicated (but better way), I simply decided to fade out the top track, while fading in the bottom. The result looked like this:

Next, a day later, I went to edit the main menu music, the swedish folk one. This time I decided to try the crossfade option. With this there is a noticeable transition between the two pieces of sound, with the sound not aligning very well at all.

I’m sure if I put the time into learning how to crossfade, I could make this transition less obvious, however being able to fade in and out, then move the clip as I want was a lot simpler to make, and less noticeable in the sound as I could align the beats together.

Next I designed a new sound asset to use, a rolling sound for the snowball. We had a placeholder sound taken from the rolling rocks in Zelda Ocarina of time, but this wasn’t a detailed enough sound, nor did it match the surface of the snow.

I started by searching for sand and dirt sounds online, as I believe sand would give the best impression we wanted. However I couldn’t find anything useful online. I then had to move some cardboard around, and discovered it sounded almost exactly like what I wanted, so I recorded the cardboard rubbing against each other.

I then used the process for looping as above. Except this time it was more tricky, as I didn’t have a beat to work with. I ended up choosing a sample of the recording, and listening to chunks of it. I then removed any parts of sound that were too identifiable. I then cut the start to the end and crossfaded it. The crossfading wasn’t as noticeable due to the lack of distinct beats.

I repeated this process four times before I got something I was happy with. The result sounds pretty nice in game. Link here.