Making Sound Effects

Last time, I talked about a bit about making a list of sound effects needed for the game. So what happens once I have the list (which I won’t for a while, but anyway…)? There’s a few ways to go about getting sound effects for a game.

The first is, of course, to make them yourself. If you’ve never seen Foley work (how sound effects are created from scratch), it’s a really fascinating process. I’d recommend checking out the special features on some movie DVDs to learn more.
Now, doing Foley work myself would be fun but it’s not really something I’ve trained in and I don’t have the proper recording equipment. Not to mention how time consuming it would be. I could hire someone, but that would be a lot of money that could be better spent on other things.

The other option is to buy the necessary effects from an existing sound effects library (there are several major ones which are commonly used by film and game companies) and then use sound editing software to tweak them as needed.
That’s definitely the faster and simpler approach, though you can’t customize the sounds quite as much as if you recorded your own. It’s almost certainly the route I’ll be taking with Aurora’s Nightmare. The main question is whether I do the editing myself or hire a sound guy to do it for me. I haven’t decided on that yet. Doing it myself would be the cheapest way to go (and I am currently on a pretty tight budget for Aurora’s Nightmare) but, while I do have some sound editing experience, it’s really not my specialty. So we’ll see. Either way though, the sound effect portion of development is still a ways off.