Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Music and Sound
We also need sound effects and music. Since our game is an 8-bit retro-style game, it's fitting
to use
chip tunes
, sound effects and music generated by a synthesizer. The most famous chip
tunes were generated by Nintendo's NES, SNES, and Game Boy. For the sound effects, we used
a tool called
as3sfxr
(Tom Vian's Flash version of
sfxr
, created by Tomas Pettersson). It can be
Figure 9-16.
as3sfxr, a Flash port of sfxr
We created sound effects for jumping, hitting a spring, hitting a coin, and hitting a squirrel. We
also created a sound effect for clicking UI elements. All we did was mash the buttons on the left
in as3sfxr for each category until we found a fitting sound effect.
Music for games is usually a little bit harder to come by. There are a few sites on the Web that
feature 8-bit chip tunes that are fitting for a game like Super Jumper. We'll use a single song
called “New Song,� by Geir Tjelta. The song can be found at the Free Music Archive (
www.
freemusicarchive.org
). It's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. This means we can use it in noncommercial projects,
such as our open source Super Jumper game, as long as we give attribution to Geir and don't
modify the original piece. When you scout the Web for music to be used in your games, always
