Alright I’d like to take a crack at helping with the Microbe Biome Ambience for this next release.
Licensing
One big thing we need to clear up is how much we can use freely available sounds off of the internet. Can anyone provide a clear explanation on whether we can, and if so what steps we need to take to be compliant with licensing rules? If not, our only option is to create all sounds ourselves eh?
Current Ambience
The ambient tracks we have now have served us well for many years. I mean no disrespect to whoever created them, but I think that they can be replaced with higher quality and more accurate ambient tracks (as with many past features and assets we have improved upon). For perspective, here are the current two ambient tracks:
I will be honest, after many times of playing the game, this ambient track is harder to listen to now. This track has a bit of a higher pitched echoing/screeching sound (that gets strong about 30 seconds in) that I cannot fully place my finger on, that doesn’t sound entirely underwater and is a little audibly irritating.
I do prefer the second track, but I think it has some areas of improvement as well. It’s more of a clearly noticeably underwater bubbling sound, but I think the problem lies in having a single “bubbling focused” ambient track that plays in every patch is the problem (and a higher pitched echoey bubble track). Additionally, the amount of bubbling you hear often doesn’t match what you see on the screen. The amount of bubbling is actually quite intense, but then you can sometimes have a screen with no activity of cells or currents or compounds or chunks on it, and not even any bubbles (though implementing 3D and mobile bubbles will be a separate task). This disconnect between the audio and the visuals broke the immersion for me at some moments and made it feel more like a game.
Solution
I think the solution, as I highlighted way back when in the original post, is to break down all possible ambient sounds into their component “ingredients”, and then come up with a “recipe” of “ingredients” for each patch. Instead of recapping all the ingredient sounds and coming up with a master list for all the patches at once, I’ll start by focusing only on the Hydrothermal Vents biome. Once we have this one done, we can move one by one through the other biomes. I can update the Original Post as we finish each biome, and then we can eventually save all that info to the wiki.
Hydrothermal Vents
I think the ambient track of the hydrothermal vents should be comprised of three main sounds:
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Underwater hum. I don’t know the exact word for it, but if you have ever fully submerged yourself underwater without too many sounds around you you know what I mean. There is a strange humming sound that occurs when you are underwater, which is probably caused by the flowing of the water on and off of your eardrums. I think having this constantly playing faintly in the background is perfect for creating the sense of being underwater (I think this is what Microbe Ambience 1 was trying to do with the higher pitches echoey sounds). The best example I can find of this sound is the following:
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Bubbling. Although I think that bubbling should not play in the ambience of other biomes, this is one place where bubbling belongs. The hydrothermal vents are constantly ejecting gasses which are dissolving into the seawater, so there should be constant bubbling. Perhaps we could have a second track where the gas release (and thus bubbling) occurs in bursts for a more sporadic vent.
- I think one big problem for now is that bubbling ambience will always feel unrealistic, since we will be able to hear them but not see them. In the future we can create a task to implement small bubble particle FX that swirl across the currents and float past the player’s camera to visually show the bubbles, and perhaps even some larger 3D bubbles that can be interacted with by the player (moved or popped).
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Occasional explosions/booms. Occasionally vents may release a large amount of pent up gas, and this could even create a shockwave in the water. There could also be moments where rocks around a vent crack from the fissuring forces of the vent. To show this audibly, every 5-8 minutes we can play distantly muffled booms or explosions amongst the ambient sound. I think this would be a really cool way of making the hydrothermal vents feel like both a fountain of nutrients and source of life, but also a little terrifying as we remind the player that they are close to volcanic activity. The best examples I could find of underwater sounding explosions/booms are below:
If we are indeed able to use free sounds on the internet without licensing problems, I can go ahead and start finding the best free samples I can find for these three sounds. If anyone has experience in sound design / sound engineering, or is able to help create any samples for these sounds themselves, I could really use the help!
