Hello once again, in this weeks blog post I will be talking about the tricks and methods I used when finding the sound effect for the submarine shooting. What is a sound effect? A sound effect is trying to recreate the feeling one would get when seeing the real object.
When it comes to my groups game, just going on the internet and searching shooting sound effect doesn’t really cut it. Since the game takes place underwater, a regular shooting sound effect would be a bit wierd coming from a submarine, so I had to be more specific with my searching. I did try to do the easy way by just searching ”underwater shooting sound effect” but nothing of use showed up. I had to improvise, at first I tried to just take a normal (free to use) shooting sound effect from Youtube and then edit that sound effect in a program called Audacity (Audacity is a free, very easy to use sound editing program where you can add different effects and even record your own voice/sounds).
The program I used, Audacity
I thought if I just distort and turn down the pitch of the regular shooting, the result would sound somewhat like a weapon being fired underwater, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. It just ended up sounding more bulky and rough, so the search kept going. I then started to look at experiment videos of other people shooting their guns underwater. By watching these I thought it could help me find the right sound I wanted for the game, and it did just that. The video that helped me finding the sound effect I wished for was this one. It’s a video made by the popular YouTube-channel ”The Slow-Mo Guys”, where they try to see how a gun works and looks like while shooting underwater. The sound it made fit the bill perfectly, and since it was already a sound coming from a real gun underwater, I only had to cut out that specific part of the video and edit that so it became ”our” sound. Too make it sound more different from the original, I added distortion, lowered the pitch and then slowed down the pace of the sound. By doing this, the result sounds more ”thicker” and ”muddier”, and since the submarine is firing rockets, that kind of sound was exactly what me and my group wanted.
I would’ve added the end result here but that feature is unfortunately locked behind a paywall here on WordPress, so if you’ve played our game during the playtesting or played the finalized version then you know how it sounds!
And that is how I found and made the shooting sound effect for my game. Thanks for reading!
– Group T, Carl HvB
Carl Hvarfvenius Blomgren 