Patreon Peeks 9: A Rolling Hero (GMTK 2020 Game Jam) (Patreon)

Hello! Today I wanted to share some insight on creating the soundscape for Tilt Quest, a game I made with André Cardoso, MikMik, and William Enders for the Game Maker's Tool Kit 2020 Game Jam. You can still download and play the game here! https://andrecardoso.itch.io/tilt-quest

I have multiple posts' worth of stuff to talk about when it came to this one exciting weekend, but for now I'd like to detail one particular noise that was probably the hardest to create. The hero is shaped like a marble and rolls around this shiny plastic landscape that you control by tilting. So, I needed foley of a marble on plastic, and I was fortunate enough to have a big marble and a plastic patio chair, like one of these:

It just barely fit into my through my door to record in my room. I laid the chair on its back and proceeded to spend about 30 minutes following the marble with my mic as I rolled it down one of the ruts in the chair's back. Eventually, I got it to roll at a consistent speed and not collide with anything for a good half a second, and about six takes worth of it.

You'd think that little of audio would get old fast, but the secret is that it's a consistent speed. That means that (as long as I followed it well enough with my mic) the volume is also consistent and the sound doesn't have glaring transients (sudden spikes in volume). Then it was time to edit it so that it could loop as long as the sound was needed.

These are the takes spliced together. The arcs are crossfades between one take to the next; as you can see, the sound is quite a hodgepodge. With each crossfade, I made sure the arcs of fading in/out sound aren't entirely linear, otherwise you can perceive a small dip in loudness whenever a crossfade happens. Just a little convexity to each sound's end can make a big difference. Once I put all the takes together, I bounced the group down to a single sound in a new Logic track for the final step: clipping the ends of the sound and crossfading those into each other, to make the whole thing seamless. No more harsh cutoff points, and ready to be exported as a 16-bit .wav file!

I supplied it to the rest of my team to implement, and they added a neat function to tie its volume to your movement speed. Given more time, I would have made more rolling sounds for different speeds and created an adaptive system, but there's very little time for adaptive audio during a game jam! All in all, this was the most difficult but truly the most important sound in the game. And for such a makeshift foley session, I'm happy with how clean it turned out!