In a recent game-jam game (Streamer UNTIL) we wanted to implement a “scare stinger” when the player spots the creature in the game.
Time was running short, there was not much time to record plenty of variations and I was afraid that playing the same stinger on every spotting might lead to repetition fatigue and would make it less and less effective.
So I had the idea to “atomize” the stinger I have had previously made and have them reassemble them in FMod.
It consists of stacked violin screeches, cymbal scrapes and cello stabs I recorded, as well as some sample strings playing bartok pizzicato.
Since I didn’t want the stingers to completely randomly pick sounds from the source I built a system that would play curated, yet random arrangements of sounds.
It’s a multi-instrument made up of - in this case - 10 event instruments of which one gets randomly selected each time.
Inside those event-instruments you will find yet another set of multi-instruments that each (except for one) have probabilities attached to them (so sometimes they play and sometimes not)
The following is one of those “sub stingers”. Since using event-instruments inside the multi-instrument it also allows me to move the sounds horizontally in order to also create some variation on the timescale.
And another one…
I still think that one might get used to them and this is probably also due to having it play very often but at least this gives it some leeway - especially for such a short game.
Since we used Steam Audio in this game I will also make a post about that in the future because this project allowed me to learn quite a bit about it.