🔊 Ambient Sounds + A Small Neighborhood Built by the Team 🏡 (Patreon)

What’s up everybody, it’s Andrei! 🪇

It’s been a loooong time since I’ve been waiting for this day and now here it is: today I’ll be showing y’all our work on the ambient sounds of the game 🥳🎉 For context, ambient sounds include things like birds, wind, crickets, distant cars and all the cozy-fuzzy noises that make a space feel immersive! Right now, I’ll be going through:

How we created the video you saw above ⬆️🎥

Our ambient sound approach 🐦

How we get the sounds 🎤

How they interact in real time depending on the context of the game 🤯

A Small Neighborhood

Tuesday, the whole team took the time to playtest the build mode again and make some really nice suburban houses. On top of testing new features and finding bugs, we created a perfect living environment to showcase all of these ambient sounds. Some people showed off their architectural skills here. The result was the nice lil’ cozy neighborhood that you saw in the video ✨I’m not gonna lie, this just got us a bit hyped to see the actual town of the game when we get closer to the release AAAAHHH!

Our Approach

In Paralives we wanted to make ambient sounds a key feature of our sound design and make the world we delve into feel alive by giving it a rich, varied and ever-changing soundscape. We were inspired by great games such as Animal Crossing, Night in the Woods, Dorf Romantik (just to name a few), where the sounds immediately hook you up without being overwhelming in the long run! They just feel like a big warm hug 🫂

How We Get the Sounds

A while ago, we decided to get most of our ambient sounds from a subscription-based library called Soundsnap. They have tons of different sounds which are all reliable quality-wise. We chose this method rather than recording all sounds to save production time and not depend on the weather and population density conditions of Montreal to record (RIP all my bird recordings with people talking in the background 😭). However, this only includes ambience and foley (all UI sounds and voiceovers will be original to the game) and it doesn’t stop us from adding our own recordings if need be 😌

How They Work In-Game

The best part of these ambient sounds is that they’re hiiiighly interactive! Besides the fact that there are tons of layers that I added in such as birds, wind, background rumble, distant car horns & bikes, cicadas, crickets, dog barks, planes and a freakin rooster, all these sounds change depending on the time of day and camera position. In fact, there are designated hours in which a sound can play.

Did you know that, because of sunshine and temperature differences, strong winds last from noon to early evening and peak around 2pm? I love my job. 

Once we add different weather changes after early access, we’ll be able to add much more depth to these ambient sounds and even vary them depending on the different map areas. There’s much we can expand upon further down the line! Right now, I’ll focus on finishing the Build mode’s UI sounds and then do some foley work that I’ll get to show you in a future Patreon post!! I wish you all a happy cozy Friyay and thank you all for your support 😊

Andrei 🐐💣BOOP

Edit - August 15th, 2024: This post is now public, feel free to share it!