💡 You didn't know: adding sound effects is a challenge

Hi guys!

Let's talk today a bit about how MyJLC was developed. 

V1.0 brought many challenges to me. I imagined it would be difficult to make complex animations, real time controls, the dynamic wardrobe system and many others. I had a checklist and was solving these one by one. However, I didn't know one of the most challenging areas would be sound effects.

Sure, it was a noob trap. I’ve read thousands of articles while dreaming of becoming a game dev. And you know what? People discuss game engines, procedural generation and other programming tricks. Everyone cares about 3D, arts and animation. They teach level design and explain the color palette affecting players' psychology. But nearly nobody talks about sound design. And maybe that was a reason I thought that I should make a game and then simply add sound effects to it in the end.

So when MyJLC was mostly complete I started to look for sound samples and discovered there were none. Yes, the Internet is full of miscellaneous sound collections and many of them are even free, however sex-related sounds are very rare. What I found after a week of searching was:

• Various SFW sounds like heartbeats, rustling, clicking or dinging – those are pretty easy to find.

• A few small bundles shared by other devs – some random but very specific sounds, I could get a few samples from it, but not much, and no moaning (which I was desperate for).

• Numerous amateur records of people having sex (on freesound.org and other sites) – pretty cool, but often really bad quality. Also those usually include many background sounds and noises, and different sound layers intersect a lot: that's totally fine when you're listening to a single show but sounds weird when cut into small pieces. Overall that feels like trying to change a font on a flat jpeg image. I guess a pro sound editor might do it, but I'm not.

• A large collection of samples scraped from other games – those are pretty good but have no license behind, so I was really worried about it. Even the ones saying ‘creative commons’ look pretty shady, as you can't just steal assets from someone's commercial product and say it's now free for everyone. 

• A popular tip ‘just go to pornhub and take the sound from random videos’ – lol from a legal point of view, but also has the same problem as other amateur records: noises, blended sounds etc. BTW I tried to follow this tip later when looking for one more good vibrator sound and, lol, couldn't get a clear 2 sec sample from a 20 mins video.

Then I suddenly found the ‘OpenNSFW’ SFX Pack and it became my savior. Hundreds of samples of slapping, squeezing, rubbing and so on, recorded and edited by a few professional sound designers. This covered mostly everything I wanted except girl’s moaning (BTW, I re-checked it a few days ago and it grew a lot: many more people joined the team, including voice actors and actresses, so now it seems to cover everything). 

Still the moaning issue was open. At this point I was ready to hire some voice actress to record it. But first we decided to try recording it at home ;-) 

No special equipment, just a few old computer mics (which appeared to work worse than the built-in phone mic). We’ve tested a few devices and a few recording apps, then different environments, filters and distances to the mic. We finished recording at midnight in the bathroom to have the least background noises. I had a concept of how the voice should work in the game, so each night I provided my wife with tasks and listened to her moaning in the bathroom, lol. 

Also it appeared to be pretty difficult to complete on-demand tasks, as the result sounded too synthetic. So in the end we came up with a funny trick: listening to some real recordings in the headphones and trying to reproduce it with her own voice. 

Then it was my turn to edit the records, sort and convert into samples. Can’t say the raw records were of a good quality, but I seemed to overwork it a bit, deforming the sound too much. That's how the voicing you hear in the game appeared! I hope one day to record a new quality voicing to replace it (and a new mic already stays on my table waiting for it).

The integration of sound effects was also a cool story, which required a lot of time and multiple code changes. But let's tell it another time, as this post is already too long to add. Just want to say minor ‘I'll simply add sfx in the end’ task took more than a month to complete.

Now you know that sound design is a large challenging task (especially for NSFW games), despite nobody talking about it.

BTW, MyJLC uses 145 sound effect samples and 358 voice samples right now.

Have a funny weekend!