Sound Design - Final Thoughts

One of my main jobs for !Bird was being the Sound Designer; this meant picking out and implementing all of the audio that went into the game, from 3D environmental sounds to UI sounds to music. I did not create any of the audio used in the game; however, I selected it from a set of libraries I had access to to fit the game feel we were going for.

I wanted the sound design of !Bird to be informed by two main aesthetics. The first was a technological, robotic feel that I wanted everything associated with B1-RD to have. Due to the premise of the game, I felt it would be important to drive home the idea that the Bird is, in fact, not a bird, but a robotic government drone. To achieve this, I filled all of the UI, from the popups to the dialogue boxes, with lots of digital and mechanical-sounding beeps, boops, and whirrs. The second aesthetic was a quirky, offbeat feel that I wanted the world of the game to have; working along with the low-poly artstyle, I thought it would be fun for everything in the game world to feel slightly off and strange. I sought to achieve this through audio like the text box voices of the characters and the music.

The implementation of most of the game's audio wasn't a challenge for the most part; the game uses Unity's built-in audio system and doesn't do anything too complicated with it, so the most complicated it usually ever got was going into the code to write in triggers for sound effects, or setting up an appropriate distance for 3D audio sources to fall off at.

One interesting challenge, however, was creating an efficient system for the character voices. Each dialogue interaction has its own "Dialogue" game object in the game's code, which contains an array of character voice clips that can be used to give a line of dialogue a unique voice. It would have been a bit of a chore to insert these audio clips for every set of dialogue, so I worked to figure out a method that would cause the text sound to have a default if one wasn't specified. This was a bit challenging to get right, but it eventually paid off well.

I really enjoyed working on the Sound Design for !Bird, and I think in the end the audio really helped bring it all together.