Procedural Audio / Sound Design

GameSynth Adventure UI – Part1: One-Shot Buttons

2019-09-19

Introduction

User interface is a topic with huge scope and designing sound for UI can cover a plethora of interactions, from simple button clicks to complex interactive systems that respond in real-time. In this mini-series, I’m going to demonstrate some ideas for generating UI audio assets for an adventure style game using GameSynth, as well as highlighting some tips for implementing them in UE4.

GameSynth

Most UI sounds in games are one-shot, and fortunately, GameSynth has a few models to design for these sorts of sounds efficiently. The Impact model offers satisfying presets right off the bat, and the Modular model is great for fleshing out more detailed ideas.

Along with its penchant for efficiency, GameSynth can help in creating stylistically appropriate sound, which is essential for creating cohesive soundscapes. To demonstrate how to achieve this, I have created some simple hover and button click sounds in a swashbuckling adventure style.

Hover

The hover/whoosh asset was made by layering and processing various whoosh renders from GameSynth. I used the preset ‘04 – Bat Soft’ as one of the layers, and created a short custom whoosh as seen below:

By creating a short, transient Automation Curve and applying it to the Saturation effect, you can add some extra punch to the attack of your sound. This can help quick UI sounds cut through the mix.

Click

The “On Clicked” sound was synthesised from a few different processes:

  1. • Modular → Preset ’43 – Blade Fight’
  2. • Impact → Resynthesis of the above ’43 – Blade Fight’ render
  3. • Impact → A few more renders from a previous blog

The Blade Fight preset shows just how far you can get with only a few modules. Since it can be quite chaotic, I used it as the more random element to allow for several distinct variations.

I then found a render that I particularly liked, and resynthesised it using the Impact model. Recycling sounds between the different models in GameSynth is an economical tactic for quickly generating additional layers.

[Ver 2019.2 NOTE] GameSynth now allows you to run a patch as a sound source in the Whoosh model, giving you even scope to easily recycle sounds between patches.

UE4

Implementation in UE4 was done simply by using the buttons’ Events to play the relevant sounds.

[TIP] While in the Graph view of the Widget Blueprint, you can select the variable corresponding to the button created in the Designer view, which brings up the buttons’ Events in the Details panel.

Part 2: Coming soon…