Black Jack Game Sounds

A Gentlemen’s Game

About:

Blackjack game in an old wild western theme, Main menu shows the outside of a saloon in a desert town in the wild west, maybe have some tumbleweed rolling across the menu in an animation, main menu soundtrack would be much louder than the in game music.

Menu-

The main menu would feature two options “Play” and “Quit” in the centre of the screen behind there would be an old western style saloon with savannah/desert emptiness in the background some dead trees or plants would be animated in the background. In the foreground there would be tumbleweed rolling across the scene every now and then with a mini sand storm cover mask would cover the screen briefly. The soundtrack would have an old western theme, with distinguishable acoustic guitar and other western harmonic sounds.

In-game

While in-game the soundtrack would be more quite than the main menu track, there are two types of music that could be played in-game. The first is a grand piano sort of jingle, it would be edited to make it feel as though it were in the room in-game this could be achieved by using surround sound and having the main volume of the piano coming from a certain direction. There would also be an old guitar and might be slightly un-tuned to give it an old broken western feel. One way in which I can record sound for the music is at home, I personally do not play guitar, however my I could get my brother to make up a western piece. A piano would also be in the track however it would be much quieter than the guitar sound. I could achieve the piano sound with an electronic keyboard wired to a computer and could then be edited in Adobe Audition.

Foley and other in-game sounds.

Other in-game sounds that would be overlaid with the music would mostly be ambient sound such as people talking, glasses ringing. On the main menu were the background is a saloon, there would be the sound of tumbleweed rolling across the ground, this sound in particular would be difficult to achieve, however a similar sound may be accomplishable with shaking of bushes. Other sounds include desert wind howling this would be very hard to obtain myself, as desert wind has a higher pitch sound that normal wind you hear every day so this Foley would need to be found in online sound libraries. Other menu Foley would be sounds being made for the clicking of options such as ‘play’ and ‘quit’ these would be a simple clicking sound (which could be achieved by a purposefully loud mouse click) which would be tweaked in audition to achieve a deeper tone and lower frequency.

In-game Foley would be for the most part the sound of cards being dealt which could be achieved with a normal set of playing cards. My blackjack game would include wooden gambling chips but would not look like the common coloured gambling chips of today, there would be a sound for movement of the chips as well. Lastly I might consider adding a edited voice of your actions, for example; when the player chooses to hit or stand, the player or dealer (which in game the player would just be able to see the bottom of his waist coat) would announce your actions. This is done in the game Red Dead Redemption which is an action/adventure open world game set in the closing days of the wild west, in the game, games such as blackjack and poker can be played a lot of my ideas stem from the mood and atmosphere of the in-game blackjack seen in Red Dead Redemption. It is also in this game where the player himself calls out what is happening as they would do in real life. This can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=D-aaeY_5Jok#t=41

Legal Considerations

For the main music I may have to get short clips of guitar sound as I do not play guitar myself, However I do have people available to me such as family members who would play a guitar piece for the game, other than the music there is not many other legal considerations to take for the sound of the game.

Creating the Sound:
The sound was all recorded in garage band on a Mac, the sounds I recorded included random speeches that can be heard at random moments in the game such as “pour me a drink” This was done using just a Microphone and recording friends speech.

(To the left are voice recordings, and bellow shows the background music.) 

The main background music was taken off from a sound library, and was edited in Adobe Audition by adding reverb, echo and other enhancements. I did think about using saloon piano music however I could not find any suitable for my game and none fit in with the style and felt a bit too fast paced. As well as adding effects to the music, I also added instruments to it including a slow pitch organ which was edited to fit the tone of the original music, I then fit the music in and lowered the frequency so it acted as a base instrument sound and is mostly constant through the entire track.

In game graphics.