Sound Design Revamp
Sound design for a game like Pigeon Simulator is uber important! It’s critical to capture the grand sense of flight, discovery, danger, and destruction found throughout the game. To pull this off, we hired expert audio producer / technical sound designer Michelle Hebert to do what she does best: make games sound great!
This is what people think I do… but let me tell you what I really do!
Hi, I’m Michelle and I’m new!
It’s so nice to be here and to provide Sound Design and all things Audio for Pigeon Simulator. I’ve spent the last month getting caught up to speed with the rest of the dev team on all things pigeons and gamedev. What does that look like? A lot of poking through all the different systems in the game, talking to the other devs and understanding all the plans, game mechanics, and looking at what the current state of Audio is for the game in general.
Most of my time has been spent in the magical world of pre-production and documentation! I wrote up a 9 page Audio Bible that addresses every level of audio needs for the game. It’s a work in progress, but it helps outline the scope of audio needs and helps us identify what types of systems audio can use to do that work efficiently and effectively.
Do you like Spreadsheets? I GOT SPREADSHEETS! We got plans for a robust system to manage impact sounds - after all if things collide, they need some sounds to make an impact! Animations are cool - but animations with sound are better. Wrangling all the project needs so I can properly scope and schedule all the audio asset needs.
Speaking of asset needs… We’re gonna need some pigeon sounds! So I reached out to my local county Pigeon Fancier Club to get the hookups with scheduling a recording session with live pigeons! I’ve also started thinking about other pigeon sounds we’ll need… here’s some tests for footstep sounds I did. I’m exploring using Edward Ultimate with Kontakt to generate foley for our animations - this was using Spot Creatures which has a variety of animal footstep sounds to sample and mix to create lots of options for how we want those to sound like.
“ I reached out to my local county Pigeon Fancier Club to get the hookups with scheduling a recording session with live pigeons!”
As I wrap up planning all the plans - I’ll be able to get started on organizing the audio project files - updating things that need updates, making new sounds for the game, recording those birds. It’s going to be an adventure!
You can follow along as Michelle shares her experiences managing “all things audio” for Pigeon Simulator from start to finish in the Monthly DevLogs!