A classic Unity tutorial
As a project for a game audio class at Berklee, I opted to follow Unity’s tutorial and make this game for myself to learn the software, rather than simply creating sound for the pre-made version offered to us. It’s a classic “roll round and collect pickups” game, but I also added an enemy ball that follows you around. (It just measures the distance between itself and the player and applies that as a vector to itself. I can’t believe two lines of code worked so smoothly.) If the enemy ball hits you before you grab all the pickups, you lose. Gather all twelve pickups without the enemy touching you, and you win.
Designing for feel, not realism
I spent some time rolling marbles on my floor and following them around with a microphone to get the marble rolling sound effect. (That’s a lot harder than you would think, by the way!) I created an FMOD event that mixes between two rolling sound loops; one slow, and one fast. But something just felt missing. There was no “oomph” to it, no sense when you play the game that you’re actually putting energy into the marble. So I added a synth-based drone that pitches up as you get faster.
Marble roll (without drone):
Marble roll (with drone):
Themed UI
When I make UI sounds, I try to come up with something that feels related to the game, not just a generic click sound. In this case, since this game feels like bowling, or maybe pinball, I created UI sounds that feel like they’re made by a janky machine:
Other audio
Other audio in this game includes pickup sounds, object strikes, and sounds for the enemy ball. I also created a looping music theme (and derived from it a looping menu theme) with adaptively-triggered endings for both lose and win conditions. All the sound implementation is handled through FMOD, including randomized pitch and volume variation to one-shot sounds to give them a stronger sense of realism and variety. Both the player ball and enemy ball take in a velocity parameter from the game engine and adjust their respective rolling sounds appropriately.
Play the game
You can download and play my version of Rollaball for free: https://augustincarroll.itch.io/rollaball
Augustin Carroll 