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Sound Design: Fantasy Forestry

Shane Ellis
Aug 9, 2016
2 min read

Zena is the planet of our game design at “Insert team name?” (and team members) Jiri Klic - Programming/Team Leader, Alyssa DeShane - Narrative & game design, Magnus Stone - Game & Cinematic design, Shane Ellis - Audio Artist .

The planet is designed to be in the fantasy state of a spiritual connection to the planet and the life on it with the banishment of the people who made machines and pursued a life full of avarice.

At this stage of designing we only really have a skeletal plot line with ideas in our heads I wanted to get a head start on designing the ambient sounds, something I could work with without visuals, I know visuals would help design sounds for the creatures that live in the forest however this could inspire myself and the artists in the creation process so it's all groovy =)

I retrieved a sample from freesound.org for a project I worked on because at the time the opportunity didn't arrive for me to capture my own sounds, that game can be found here (**SUGAROPOLIS**). But I didn't stop there, due to not having my recording gear and while couch surfing I had to make do with what I had at home on the desktop (yeah my desktop travels with me) so I ended up using the dog sample found here and I really enjoyed what came out of it so you thank you Felix Blume for putting that sample online for anyone to use.

Birds

Insects

So when I was messing about with the bird sounds I had some happy accidents that came to insects, nice night time chirpiness.

From the *dog sample* to the *Bird sample* to this *Insect sample*

In Ableton I set up a MIDI track with a sampler plugin on the track where I placed the *Dog sample* in and adjusting to which part of the sample I wanted to play and how I wanted it the play the sound, in this case the end to the middle parts of the sample to play continuously until the MIDI note stops and has “Reverse” enabled. Although this set up always rings out in a fluttering loop where in the modulation tab in the sampler I altered the frequency pattern and set the oscillators to start looping at specific frequencies.