Making UI Sound Effects

Hey everyone!!! Andrei here hoping that you’ve had an awesome week! Up until now, I’ve talked to you about music in Paralives such as how we produced some demos to test the musical direction of the game (if you wanna check that out, here’s the link to that Patreon post!). But today we’re gonna give things a little twist and talk instead about UI sound effects! What are they? How do we make them? What’s up with that puppy? All your questions will be answered 😌 This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

In the above video, you just saw parts of our Paramaker showcase video with clips of me recording the sounds you hear on screen! The rest of the audio from the gameplay is muted. The sounds showcased are a tiny bit edited and were the simplest ones production-wise to show in this post, the rest are too edited or processed with effects. The lil’ pup next to me at the end of the video is Kurama, being curious as usual. So without further ado, let’s talk sound!

What’s a UI Sound Effect?

As the name implies, a UI sound is basically just audio triggered when the player performs an action in the user interface (UI). Let’s say you’re in the Paramaker then push a button to create a new Para and hear a beautiful “Boop!” sound. This lets you know that you did something and rewards your action. Before starting to make them, we gotta keep in mind many things such as the layout of the UI, which options are more important, the duration of the sound effect (most UI sounds tend to be very short!), among other things.

How Do We Record Them?

There are many ways to design a sound effect but it all comes down to 2 types of approaches: synthesis (using digital sources) and foley (using real life sources). In Paralives, we decided to go with foley to have that cozy, organic character (“BOOP!”). Believe it or not, the way I come up with all these sounds is by finding as much junk as I can around my house or at the dollar store, banging it together in all possible ways and making sense of the chaos I created. I could use anything from musical instruments, toys, clothes, cosmetics, kitchen tools, food, trash, furniture, myself (!), basically anything. In my experience, the cheapest junk makes the best UI sounds.

How Do We Polish Them?

After hours and hours of recording, comes the part where I’ll relisten to all of the tracks to find the best sounds for what I’m looking for. I tend to look for sounds that have potential to complement a specific game functionality rather than something that sounds like a finished product. Then, I edit those sounds (trim, fade, change pitch) and process them with effects (equalization, compression, ringshifting, etc) and voilà! On average I actually end up using only 3 to 5% of all the sounds I recorded. Here’s a screenshot of the Logic Pro project displaying all the sounds I’ve made for the Paramaker so far:

Each small colored rectangle is an individual sound. There’s around 2100 ish of them here but some of them are repeated.

Overall, it’s a super fun but very weird process recording all these little sound effects. You can get so creative with literal junk and it can sound amazing. And this only encompasses one type of sound in just one single game mode!!! Imagine for the rest of the game! I’ll be needing a wider screen for the next screenshot. I’m curious to know, what part of the sound design are you mostly looking forward to in the game? Did you like one sound specifically? What kind of sounds do you think will fit the cozy world of Paralives best? Thanks y’all for the love and support, it really means tons.

Have a cozy and warm weekend,

Andrei 🎵🎹

(BOOP!)