(Click or tap to enlarge)
This week’s demo contains a couple of visible changes, and one huge invisible change - which will become very visible (or, rather, audible) in the weeks ahead!
What you’ll likely notice first is that the flying saucers now fire differently-colored orbs, depending on which sound they make. Their rhythm has also been modified a bit, and the sound volume levels have been re-balanced. The biggest change, however, concerns the sounds themselves.
Until now, I’ve been creating all of the game’s sound effects manually. This meant that if I wanted to add a new sound to the game, I had to:
Modifying any specific sound has required me to repeat all of these steps, every single time. This made minor changes annoying, and major changes (such as altering the sound of the “hum” which the cubes make) extremely slow, fidgety, and error-prone.
As of this week, however, the game features a built-in audio synthesis engine, which is already capable of creating a wide variety of retro-inspired sounds on-the-fly. Using this new engine, the process of adding a new sound to the game is:
I can, for instance, modify the hum of the cubes in a matter of seconds. Most of the sounds haven’t been transferred over to the new system yet, but there will likely be some auditory upgrades as that process unfolds.
More excitingly, this opens up the possibility of dynamically generating new sounds, with random attributes, when the player enters a new area. Or perhaps some enemy weapons might have random attributes which might affect their sound. It opens up a lot of new options!
Download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.
(Archived gamedev post from 2025-09-27)
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