Hey Indies,

One thing that my LD 22 entry (and most games I make) lack is sound.  I have little to no experience making sound, so I wanted to get some feedback from the community about how indies either prepare or gather sound effects for their games.  Right now, my “option of choice” is to go to Freesound.org and play with sounds for ~1 hour until I find the ideal one I want to use (for 1 sound clip), and it takes forever, and sometimes the sound I want isn’t there!

I did notice the LD team was awesome and posted a bunch of tools here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tools/ for us to use, which is cool, but I had a few questions for the community.  Answer as few or as many as you’d like!

Do you use LD’s recommended tools?  Are they any good?
Do you outsource your sound generation (can’t for LD-comp) to someone else?  Do you pay them?
Do you use any other tools to generate sound?  Free vs. Low-Cost?
Do you make your own music?
Finally, do you use any reliable royalty-free sites to pull music and sound from? (is that legal for LD?)

Thanks for sharing!
Josh

I posted this on my personal blog as well, but thought it was appropriate to post here as well, since it directly relates to my Ludum Dare 22 entry.

Ludum Dare Entry: Play/Rate The Wizard Apprentice

Ludum Dare was really an eye opening experience for me.  I had a ton of fun and I’m getting an amazing amount of feedback from the indie gamedev community, which is fantastic!  Thank you all so much for running the competition, for participating, and for the honest feedback.  I intend to compete again, not for prizes but for the love of game development and to give back to the community!

I think as a result of the experience, I’m going to continue developing “The Wizard Apprentice” prototype into a more feature-full game.  I may even write the 2nd chapter in our curious little wizard’s adventure for the next Ludum Dare…  I love doing the level and puzzle design and dropping the assets in and playing with them is really a blast!  I’m not going to abandon my HexDev project, but it’s moving to the back burner for a while.

I decided that I’m going to run with the concept and fix a lot of things, keeping some of the puzzles the same, rewriting some, and adding a lot more content.  I’m probably going to rename the game, because the name is too generic and I literally decided on the name in the last 10 minutes of the competition while I was submitting my entry. 😀

I’ve done a couple of things so far, worth mentioning, so here’s a glimpse:

• I’m revamping the way my modeling in Blender was done, so I have cleaner transitions and better control over connections like the stairwell.
• Opened up the room depth, taking full advantage of the “octagonal space” on each floor.
• Stairwells no longer require a turn halfway through (I’m not sure if this will make it harder or easier, but so far I like the new style better)
• Adding Toon-Style shading where appropriate
• Fixed some camera angle issues to give better depth perspective.  (may tweak this some more)

As a result of the feedback I’ve received so far (and the lack of time I had for implementing it to begin with, the following fixes are on my list already):

• Fix First Person Camera control to face the direction the avatar is upon entering.
• Fix the mouse cursor by locking it in place and adding a crosshair type GUI element while channeling “C”
• Add Textures to the walls to give it visual flare.
• Add Music, Sound.
• Improve “hidden” objects like keys in cabinets, so picking them up doesn’t go unnoticed.
• Adding more floors, more puzzles, more secrets, more ghosts, possibly a kitten (?)

Lots more to come!  Stay tuned!

If you’re interested in following the progression of this game in the future, you may want to subscribe to my blog, where I will probably be posting some Alpha builds continuously as things get updated.

Thanks!

-Josh