Hi guys,

I'm a professional sound designer & composer/man on a mission with a huge interest in indie games development.

One thing I notice a lot in indie games is that the audio is usually the weakest area of most games and that audio seems to be the thing that's overlooked time and time again in games development.

I want to try and make it easier for yourselves, the indie dev community, to easily get access to the sort of good quality audio assets that you need, as I get the impression from speaking to a few people that a decent number of good quality sounds that fit together are either too expensive, too hard to find or implement properly and as such it puts a lot of people off trying to use audio to it's fullest potential in their games.

I'm hoping to to put together a selection of user-friendly, budget-priced sample packs made for specifically for indie devs, with a wide collection of some of the most likely sounds that you might need (ambiences/foley/menu & gui sounds/weapons/etc.) and in numerous styles (cartoon/retro/action/scifi/etc) in the hope that they will fit hopefully all or if not the vast majority of your requirements.

I am also considering including pdf tutorial files in these sample packs that not only explain some of the technical jargon (sample rates/bit rates/file formats/compression/etc.) but that also give some suggestions on how to implement it properly and how to use it to your advantage to make your game feel more user-friendly and polished overall. Is this something that any of you might be interested in?

In order to create the most effective and useful sample packs, I'd really like to hear about your thoughts, ideas and experiences using audio in games and hopefully find out a bit about things like where you get your sounds from and how much you're willing to pay for audio for your project.

I'd also really like to hear about what sort of problems you encounter with finding good quality samples and what issues you come across integrating audio into your games.

I'm very open to suggestions or requests so please feel free to let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Tom

I'm hoping to to put together a selection of user-friendly, budget-priced sample packs made for specifically for indie devs, with a wide collection of some of the most likely sounds that you might need (ambiences/foley/menu & gui sounds/weapons/etc.) and in numerous styles (cartoon/retro/action/scifi/etc) in the hope that they will fit hopefully all or if not the vast majority of your requirements.

This sounds like a really good idea. Finding a budget version of consistent sound files is really hard. Just make it budget, we indies, in the sense of hobby-project-indies, are notoriously low on budget.

I am also considering including pdf tutorial files in these sample packs that not only explain some of the technical jargon (sample rates/bit rates/file formats/compression/etc.) but that also give some suggestions on how to implement it properly and how to use it to your advantage to make your game feel more user-friendly and polished overall. Is this something that any of you might be interested in?

To be honest, if you use sound in your game, you got already in contact with all this terms and should know what you need. Using a standard format and some tools to mix/downsample a soundfile should be part of the indie workflow

In order to create the most effective and useful sample packs, I'd really like to hear about your thoughts, ideas and experiences using audio in games and hopefully find out a bit about things like where you get your sounds from and how much you're willing to pay for audio for your project.

Sound packs should be grouped logically. Eg

- Interface sounds

- Common (Medieval) RPG sounds (combat)

- Monster/Creature sounds

- Gun sounds

- Character sound (from grunting, jumping, moving, cloth-rushing etc.)

etc.

- Ambient sounds (!)

I'd also really like to hear about what sort of problems you encounter with finding good quality samples and what issues you come across integrating audio into your games.

There's always one or more sample missing, you really need. Therefor it would be nice , to have a collection of 'base sound' which could be used to mix your imaginated sound on your own. Eg high pitch sounds to low rumble, rushing, chain...

All of those things would be wonderful for the community.

As you probably know, sound usually comes toward the end of the development cycle, usually not getting added until around the last quarter of development. I think much of that (in the professional environment) is because audio is much harder to manipulate than code or graphics and so you want to have something that is a hopefully stable target.

I think another part is that most hobby and homebrew people don't think of audio as a big component, even though most people know it is usually the key feature in defining mood and environment, often even more than graphics. For some reason when you start listing components of a game, people think, "Oh yeah, and some sound I guess."

I don't know how people continually overlook that. Some people buy giant televisions and then rely on crappy 2-speaker behind the television for audio. Other people are fine with a small screen but wire up the room for 7.2 audio (or at least 5.1) so their seat rumbles at all the right places. As you can probably guess, I'min the latter category.

I think much of that (in the professional environment) is because audio is much harder to manipulate than code or graphics and so you want to have something that is a hopefully stable target.
I think another part is that most hobby and homebrew people don't think of audio as a big componen

I think a bigger part is that audio doesn't take as long, and shouldn't be made too early since the audio requirements can change later, depending on features that might be changed.

+ you go crazy hearing the same song over and over again, finally you need another song because you dont like it anymore.

Just my experience.