An aspect of BALL x PIT that I’m very proud of is the sound design. Previously I’ve relied on Audacity and freesound.org for my previous projects, but this time I wanted to elevate the audio to a level that matched the production value of everything else. Big thanks goes to the composer Amos Roddy who provided a lot of feedback and advice, along with adding some embellishments of his own.

Learning Resources

I came into this process with only a very basic understanding of sound, so I knew I needed to do some learning. I spent a bunch of time diving deep into learning the fundamentals of audio production, mostly by watching videos on Youtube. Some of my favorite channels:

• Audio University – Informative videos about the basics
• Marshall McGee – Lots of interesting videos specific to game sound design
• LAxemann – Combination of tutorials and informative videos
• Dan Worrall – I didn’t understand most of what he was talking about but he was good at talking about it
• Noah Sitrin – Comically complicated plugin chains, but fun to watch and found a lot of cool plugins through him
• You Suck at Producing – Entertaining music production tips that also apply to sound design
• REAPER Mania / The REAPER Blog – Tutorials for Reaper, the main tool I used to design sounds

Tools / Libraries

This was the first time that I had budget set aside for sound design, so I was comfortable spending money on things I otherwise would not have been. Admittedly I went a bit overboard and bought a lot of things I didn’t really need, but sound design culture is weird in that it makes you feel like the tools/plugins are more important than they maybe really are. I don’t think these are all essential to making something sound cool, but some of these really helped me out a lot. I chose to buy sound effect libraries rather than record things myself just to save some time and not have to train up on a whole other new subdiscipline.

• DAW: Reaper with a few essential extensions:
  • nvk_WORKFLOW – Really useful set of tools to streamline repetitive sound design tasks
  • Lokasenna Radial Menu – Huge time saver when adding plugins to different tracks
• Audio Plugins:
  • Fabfilter Pro Plugins – Seems like everyone uses them, they’re cool. Basically used Q and L on everything, with a bit of MB, C, and R, and maybe G a couple times
  • The Cargo Cult Subquake – Used it a bunch to add some rumbling to a few sounds
  • Zynaptiq Morph – Ended up being really helpful when making humanoid enemy sounds
  • Kilohearts Phase Plant – A really cool tool that I used a couple times, but seemed a bit too complex for someone who also had to make a whole video game
  • Soundtoys 5 – People love these plugins but I didn’t end up using them that much, mostly just a bit of Decapitator
• Sound Effect Libraries (mostly bought on sale on A Sound Effect):
  • Rock the Speakerbox – Various libraries
  • Boom Library – Various libraries
  • Mattia Cellotto – Cataclysm, Rocks Momentum, Glacier Ice
  • Soundmorph – Gore 2
  • Lots of other smaller libraries
• Audio Middleware: FMOD

Designing Gameplay Sounds

For the ball bouncing gameplay, one of my goals was create a textural landscape where each round has a unique sonic feel based on your equipment and environment. I decided to focus on variety as much as possible. Each ball has a unique sound, each environment has a unique set of sounds, each character, etc. Each sound effect usually had 6 variations, most of that work was done from the libraries I used. The sheer quantity of different sound effects meant that I had to work as efficiently as possible, not spending too much time on any one sound effect. No single sound would make or break the experience, the overall texture of the mix was more important.

One of the main challenges with designing sound for this game was keeping the mix to a manageable and readable level, given how chaotic everything gets, with potentially hundreds of balls and enemies on screen. Some ways I tried to address this:

• In the actual sound effects – I tried to make things all very quick and snappy with very short tails. I’d often have to speed up the sounds I took from libraries by 2-3x just to be able to keep things in line. I also often took off a chunk of the high and low end and kept most things in mono to make things sound further away.
• Routing – I made heavy use of sidechain compressors in my routing setup in FMOD. More important sounds (like bosses, special balls) would compress less important sounds (baby balls, player shooting).
• Instance Limiting – I set every gameplay sound effect to be limited to 2-4 instances, with a 40-100ms cooldown between plays.
• Dynamic EQ and Panning – In FMOD I set gameplay sounds to dynamically EQ’ed and panned based on their position on the screen. This served as a kind of “fake spatialization”, the purpose of which was to try to thin out the mix as much as possible rather than actually serving to spatialize the sounds. The further back the balls were, more of the high end was taken off. On the X axis, I pushed the panning a bit more than what would feel natural based on the perspective.

Designing Base Sounds

For the base, the mix a had bit more room to breathe. My main goal was to make things feel tactile. Again, a focus of mine was variety, but I achieved it with a different method. I created what I called “SFX Palettes” for each material a building could have, like metal, wood, cloth, straw, etc. These were just a set of sounds that could be played at various parts of the base building section (on pick up, place, hover, etc). Then I assigned each building a set of palettes that would layer on top of each other when certain actions would happen. On top of that, I applied an EQ based on the size of the building. Smaller buildings would have more of the low end taken off, while larger buildings would have the low end boosted. This let me give each building a unique set of sounds based on their size and materials they were made out of, without having to manually design each and every one of them.