Today's devlog was supposed to be about coding and how I approach it, but due to the battle I had with audio design in SokoSolitaire, the plan has changed!
You know, I usually enjoy working on audio. Sure, I can't listen to music or podcasts in the background as I need to hear everything well, but it can be fun to search for sounds and then play with them in editing.
I often get praise for the audio in my games, especially in my newer titles. Personally I think Dark Crypt and Sokobos have the best audio of them all. The sounds greatly relay what they need do and they sound satisfying or as the fancy folk say - cathartic.
I never struggled with sound as much as I did in SokoSolitaire before. If you look at the screenshot, what do you see? Cards and card related stuff! An arrow that flips the cards, field that allows you to stack cards and last but not least a suit changer that will (surprisingly!) change the suit and color of any card that is pushed onto it and last but not least, cards. SokoSolitaire needs a lot of card or card-like sounding sounds, but they also need to be distinct enough from one to another so you clearly know what each sound represents.
For context, Sokobos has some really good, crunchy and satisfying sounds, but it took me only 2 days to find them all and then adjust them for my needs. See, not only there are a lot of good free recordings out there of rocks falling, sliding, and so on, they also sound good before I even edit them.
In SokoSolitaire's case it took me 5 days to be satisfied with how things sound, so what went wrong and why was the audio journey filled with pain and despair? Honestly, just finding good enough sounds that can be improved by editing proved to be very challenging.
There aren't as many sounds out there for cards and some just aren't what I need, others have horrible quality or way too much background noise. Often removing the background noise meant parts of the sound would be removed as well, ruining the sound as a whole.
Another issue is that sometimes sounds can sound great on their own, but when you put them in the game, you realize they just don't fit. On day 2 of audio work, I finally became somewhat satisfied with the sounds in SokoSolitaire, only to realize the next day that most of them are bad. Audio is very important for games, so I decided to remove them, which meant I had to start pretty much from a scratch after 2 days of hard work.
I even went through some asset packs that suffered the same quality problems as mentioned before, but some of them were from 2012 and I assume back then everyone just had lower standards.
My game development motto is that you have to pick your battles and sometimes you just have to settle for good enough, however your good enough has to be great in case of audio, because sound are just so important. It's one of the first things you will notice upon launching a game as you get to hear sounds before usually even getting to the gameplay. For example the sounds you will hear in menus when you hover or click buttons.
Another thing worth mentioning is that sounds being good and fitting is not enough in itself though because you will hear some sounds hundreds if not thousands of times while playing the game, so you also have to make sure they don't sound annoying after hearing them for an extended period of time.
Last but not least, sounds (and music too) really just bring the whole game together. Audio plays a huge part of giving player feedback. Seeing your character move is not enough, you need to hear it and the sound needs to sound good.
For me, audio design is a lot about gut feeling and trial and error. I don't have a trick how I decide what sound is good or bad, I just listen to it, put in game, see how it feels there and then adjust it until it sounds great.
Overall, I am very happy with how the game sounds right now even though the journey to get there was a torturous one.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/