In addition to music for No Longer Alone, I also made some sound effects. Making the sounds was a bigger challenge for me. Even though there is more length to the musical content, a short sound has to make its point with just a tiny slice of texture. It has to blend or clash appropriately with the music depending on its purpose. In music, the sound comes from instruments and there are established rules, but where do you get sound for its own sake? The results here range from heavily processed recordings of everyday sounds to generated waveforms -- and some combinations of the two.
Button Click
Click a button and the button clicks. SFX-button-click.mp3
Fire Laser
The default weapon. pew pew pew! SFX-fire.mp3
Warp
Those tricky aliens warp around while you're trying to shoot them. Woosh! SFX-warp.mp3
Hit!
Sound that confirms when you've hit an enemy ship. SFX-hit.mp3
Kaboom
This is probably my favorite sound effect of the bunch. I'm not very good at the game, but it's really satisfying when a ship blows up. I layered a couple of explosions generated with the Fire and Explosions plugin for Audacity, and then added Sliding Stretch, Reverb, and Phase effects. SFX-kaboom.mp3
Warning Alarm
An alert signals when you are running out of either time or energy. SFX-timer-or-energy-low.mp3
Weapon Not Ready
Firing is rate limited in the game, and this is the audio cue to let you know you can't shoot yet. SFX-weapon-not-ready.mp3
Radar
The radar scan reveals where enemy ships are. SFX-radar.mp3
EMP
Electromagnetic pulse weapon that stalls enemy ships. I wanted to give it kind of a "powering down" sound. SFX-emp.mp3
Plasma Arc Ultra Laser
Ths Plasma Arc Ultra Laser (I see what you did there, Paul) is big and bad. It drops any ship it hits, so the sound needed to reflect that. SFX-plasma.mp3
Weapon Swap
The main menu of the game lets you pick a special weapon. Initially we had the firing sounds play upon selection, but decided having a nice clunky mechanical sound would really give it some atmosphere. Unfortunately, I don't have an enormous galactic shotgun around the house. The closest things I could find were a comb binding machine and a single hole punch. I layered the recordings from these and added lots of pitch bending and reverb. SFX-weapon-swap.mp3
Alien Noise
Evil alien noise! This plays in the Game Over track. I think incomprehensible aliens are more interesting (and more likely) than overly anthropomorphic ones, so I wanted a sound that was vaguely biological, maybe bug-like, but not in a way you could pin down. Rattling a handful of backgammon checkers and mangling the recording in Audicity did the trick. SFX-alien-noise.mp3