Case 9 - Behold: Sound.

In this week we got to make sounds and music for our game. All the sound have to be triggered by AS3. It also has to be license-free, meaning that I can’t use for instance Britney Spears – Oop I did it Again in my game.

I wanted to have one special theme that was going to loop in the background, a sound when the hero picked up orbs, a sound for when the he hit enemies, some catch-phrases my hero would shout out every once and a while, and some other music bits I could use in my intro/outro. I tried looking on the internet on several free-sound web-pages, but I wasn’t completely happy with the material I found. Therefore I contacted a friend of mine, who makes digital music and sounds. I explained how my game worked and described what kind of sounds I wanted. And after a while I got some material that I’m very happy with.

The way of adding music was quite simple. On our group meeting on Monday I learned all I needed to know. This time Ole Andreas created a chat-like thing in our Fronter-room that he used to show us what code we needed to use sound in AS3. I think that method worked out really good, because we could all talk, read/write the code, and use the code by typing it in our own scripts at the same time.

The way I added sound to my game was quite easy. First I imported the necessary properties, made variables for the sound I would use from my library, and then I made variables for 3 different sound channels. By creating sound channels you can play several sounds “on top of each other”. For instance background music and a sound when you pick up orbs. I created one channel for background sound/music, one for sound-effects, and one for vocals.

I managed to add a background music easily and a sound when you pick up an orb. One problem I’ve encountered here is that I chosen to just scale the orbs down to 0 when they’re picked up, instead of removing them, and that leads to that every time I walk over the place where an orb used to be, the sound is also played. I’m currently working on this at the moment and I won’t publish a new version of the game before I feel comfortable with it.