sunfire

Identity In Progress

  • he/they🪶

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Avatar by @TuxedoDragon
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General-interest posting,
art, casual devlogs,
serial collector of hobbies and projects.
For just gamedev see @sunfire-interactive
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I jump between projects quite often, but here are some that I'm continuing to orbit around and will likely keep up with as long as I can.
Gamedev Projects:
Riptide Manor
Misc. Gamedev Resources
Worldbuilding Projects:
The King's Domain
The Roamer's Library
Custom Lego Themes:
Freeracers
TripleCross///
OverRiders///_
Other stuff:
Every Elden Ring character i've ever made


Sunfire Interactive on Itch
sunfire-interactive.itch.io/
The Starlight Garden (under construction)
starlight.garden/

How do i make sound effects that sound decent in real-time and slow motion?

Doubly hard because i want to make the timescale changeable as a difficulty option.

I do have a couple of ideas to start with:

  • Slowing down and putting effects/muffling on the sounds so that they're reasonably good sounding without feeling weird in slow motion
    • This is probably the easiest, i'd say, though it might take some effort on the effects
  • Speeding up the effects in normal speed, and using higher-fidelity/slower sounds that sound good in slow motion.
    • This would be a bit harder on the sound design front, which is already not my strength, and might not play well with the variable-slow-speed options.

And the less viable:

  • Blending between the two??
    • Just thought this up now, would double the effort for making/finding sounds but this is maybe how a Proper Production Team would do it
  • Just. Not bothering
    • I'm not doing this one because it's unsatisfying but the real problem with it would be lining up the sounds with relevant events because those events can last different durations depending on who's turn it is

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in reply to @sunfire's post:

lmk if you want examples of what each of these would sound like! not super hard to do

and not to burst your bubble any but the real "AAA" grade answer is actually the not bothering one :v

generally speaking the duration of anything including effects is super variable during production, so 99% of sounds are "impulses", meaning it doesn't matter how long they are, they just trigger once and have a longish tail, or they loop, so you can make them any duration dynamically

and not to burst your bubble any but the real "AAA" grade answer is actually the not bothering one :v

haha that's fair, in all honestly the only game i've ever seen do anything like this is Superhot, and i'm not really wanting to put that much emphasis on the time-scaling so i might stay away from scaling the sounds up and down even if it would """make sense""".

i assume you want things to sound slow, right? like a slowed-down tape? if u have the time & budget, u should consider making separate sets of sfx for real-time and slowed down gameplay. thatll give you the best results.

The slow mo guys made a video about how they make their slow-mo sound effects. that might be useful!

if you go the (quicker, easier) audio processing route, you generally don't actually slow down the effects as far as the video/gameplay is slowed down. shoot for like 50-75% speed at minimum and focus on making them sound right. dont muffle them, thatll happen when u slow them down anyway bc of sample rates and microphone frequency response limitations. like @alloyed said, your impulse sfx wont need much adjustment beyond that, but anything longer that needs to sync may need to be chopped up and/or adjusted.

good luck!

honestly, i'm not sure if i want them to sound slowed down, that's the thing!
but those are some good points (from both of you) about impulse sfx.

one other idea i forgot to add here was using some looped "fill" fx for continuous things (e.g. a wave-like water attack with rushing water sfx) that ramp their volume up and down, in combination with hit sounds for proper damage/impact.

that's how i've been thinking about doing movement as well (since it's very slidey and not realistic with stepping motions)