Behind the Scenes: Making Household Sounds 🔉 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here we are with yet another behind-the-scenes post of the sounds of Paralives! In this post, we are going over some foley sounds (which we also showed in our last post about footstep recordings that you can check out here). This time, we’ll be focusing more on everyday household items! We’ll be checking which items need a sound and how we make them 🎙️

🎥In the above video, you saw some gameplay footage of Jason using many items along with the recording footage of these items’ sounds. There are many more item sounds presently in the game but either they weren’t recorded in video or they were too long to show here. So without further ado, let’s talk about the details 🎶

Which Items Need a Sound?

There are over 1500 build mode objects in Paralives, many of which have different sounds and trigger different animations! If we also needed different variations of the same sounds, that would end up being over thousands and thousands of recordings! For that reason, we need to prioritize which sounds are the most important to add for Early Access: the sounds that stand out the most and would make the gameplay experience weird if they weren’t included in the game. Eventually, we’ll be adding the rest into the game.

How Do We Make Them? 

Once we know what sounds we need, I capture some gameplay footage and record the audio over it while mimicking the movements of the animations. Sometimes it’s as simple as just recording the same object in real life (i.e. a shower), but sometimes, you need to get creative and get things that sound similar (i.e. a can opener for a screwdriver). The importance is not to make something sound realistic, but rather satisfying. I record some takes of the many different animations, edit them and put them into the game. Simple as that!

With the town being currently worked on (which we gave a sneak peek of in this post!), there are so many possibilities to add to the soundscape of Paralives! There are still many more sounds to be done, but I’m already so excited to see everything come together in the game! What was your favorite part of the video? What would you like to see in a future “behind-the-scenes” post? As always, thank you so much everybody! 

Have a great week,

Andrei ♪♩♩ ♪♩♩♩

Edit - May 15th, 2025: This post is now public, feel free to share it!