As part of the Audio section of my GDD I wanted to include some sound effects, for example when collecting Energy pickups in the levels. I was particularly inspired by the sound of the collectible pickups in N++, as they are instantly recognizable for anyone who played that game in the past. However, I wanted all non-diegetic sound effects to be very unobstrusive as the visuals and music should take the forefront. For this task I used the audio software Ableton Live but these kinds of sounds can be easily remade in any decent software or synth.
Designing the Sound
I started off with a sine wave playing a simple chord of F#, G# and C#.
After that I added a super short ping-pong delay (a.k.a an echo effect that goes from one ear to the other).
Then, I added a sawtooth wave playing the same notes, slightly modulating the sine wave for a bit of edge.
This was good but needed a bit more tweaking to sound satisfying. I filtered out some of the high frequencies so the sound was less grating, but added in some white noise to play with every note to add some texture.
This sounded great. Finally, I made a new variant that adds another note on top. This would play when an Energy Cluster is collected.
As discussed in my notes on the Game Audio
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