Game Design Elements - Sound Effects Competition

You may remember the Mario RPG Story Contest from a couple of weeks or so ago, which MegaMan won (congrats! and **** I still owe you a trophy). This competition is different. In this competition your task will be to create sound effects for any series of Mario games that you would like to using your microphone and whatever you have at your disposal at home. These sound effects may not be used by anyone without the creator's permission, fyi. In addition to packaging the sound effects, or instead of, you may provide an exe example of your sound effects and how you apply them in a game. If you do this, please provide all necessary dlls.

For example you could smash two items together for an impact sound effect.

The point of these competitions is to make a point: Much more goes into game development than programming, artwork, and music. A lot of talent and effort goes toward making quality games. Though our strive for excellence may be more casual than business like. There can be a lot of fun to be had in doing something like making sound effects in your game rather than recycling Nintendo's.

Your sound effects may sound somewhat similar to Nintendo's but under no circumstance should you copy/paste them. If you edit, do edit the sound effect enough that people can hear the effort you put into it. This competition's purpose is to start from scratch and to look deep into your own creativity and ingenuity. When submitting your sound effects (at least five different ones), you should put them in a zip file and share a link to them here, name the sound effects appropriately, and you can include character grunts (for you impressionists out there!).

Have fun and play fair! The voting will start Sunday, May 25th. Because this competition is unofficial the most I can offer you is a sprited trophy of your requested character and bragging rights. Get crackin!

This post has been edited by Joshua Werner on May 4 2008, 10:18 PM

Sticky. I think these should go official in the FGD.
Even if there's no badges.

Well you have access to the Forum 12! Make a suggestion!

And I'm sure that we could pick out badges from here http://mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=1&id=1271

Joshua, That is a great idea

The badge can be that one to the left of the happy heart!

I still think the trophies are a better prize. And I may try this.

This post has been edited by Black Boo on May 4 2008, 10:16 AM

Or Mario's head and the flame around it, lol.

It's only a suggestion

Darkyoshi, that's the super reviewer badge. Why not the Smiley face one for the Game Design elements Comps in general?

Why not the badge that is at the left of the sprite comp badge?

I'd love you guys to get back to the competition, otherwise I'll unsticky this again >_>
I'll post about this in Forum 12, who knows, maybe it helps.

Now this is a pretty clever idea. I doubt I'll be able to make any but I'm awaiting everyone else's submissions.

Newsflash
These competitions will not go official most probably.
After all this comp for example isn't even about a specific topic, just SFX in general, so the biggest argument is that it will sooner or later run out of ideas if it is done regularly.
But still I'll keep these stickied as they're nevertheless interesting.

Have fun, even if you can't win badges, k?

This particular competition is going to be very limited, I must say.

Most people don't have the means to create a proper sound effect, nor the equipment to do so from scratch. If you guys don't believe me, watch some interviews with people who have created sound effects for video games. A lot of damn work is put into making it as precise as possible, and there's a huge process behind just recording it, never mind post-production and editing and equalizing and compressing and yada yada.


I hope someone proves me wrong, however I am doubtful of that likelihood.

Most people don't have professional game libraries and soundfonts either, and they're not required. It's fine if the sound effects aren't very good -- everybody is submitting MIDI's in the music competition for ****'s sake :/

Hey Yoshiman, thanks a lot for spoiling the mood for the competition. O.o; You can make a lot of sound effects out of everyday items, just use a little imagination. Or just do a bunch of Mario grunts. Your choice really.

He's just noting a few problems with sound creation, that being that the professional sound process is complicated and the tools for it are not widespread or cheap

And basically said "I don't see this ending well".

Anyway if I had a microphone I'd enter myself. It's a fun idea imo.


Anyway, consider this, you're an amateur developer working on games in your spare time and you decide to create an original game with your own material. Are you going to cheap out and borrow sound effects from other, commercial games and risk a lawsuit just because you can't afford the equipment? No. You're going to improvise and use what you got. And if that means banging random things together to find the right sound, so be it.

The whole purpose of these competitions is to get us members to think, and to think outside the box. If you limit yourself to the cubicle you're in, you're bound to lose interest sometime. There is a box around fangaming, you either have the skills to develop the right mechanics in your engine or you don't. You can either sprite or you cannot. When you consider that, it's easy to understand why some members on MFGG may lose sight of fangaming on the forums: a lot of people are convinced they can't contribute anything of interest to them to fangaming.

I want that to change so I'm experimenting, treading uncharted waters. If this sound effects competition is a flop, I'll just find another theme to experiment with. So please do provide support and encourage others to participate. It'll be fun!

This post has been edited by Joshua Werner on May 4 2008, 09:40 PM

Which is why I'm hoping someone will prove me wrong - that they'll be able to create some really good sound effects by just using a mic and recording several items/concepts, and maybe using a free tool to fix it up better.


As for the music part, for the music competition, the actual composing/arranging of the music and the creativity behind the notation and such is important, not the quality itself. However, in the case of sound effects, there are 2 important values to them - the usage of them in a game/how they adapt to the game, and, really, the quality of them. Since this competition isn't for fangame programmers to take their sound effects and use them in a game, then the only other one you have left there is the quality.


But again, there is definitely a chance that someone can create something great out of poor quality work - just look at the YouTube videos for that guy that records himself with an average camera doing different stuff with his mouth, and then making music out of it.

Agreed. Few people enter the music competitions, let alone one for making sounds. Not to be a downer, but I just can't see this going anywhere.

Please do not make comments like that. They don't contribute anything good to the topic.