I have been working as a freelance game audio designer for about 7 years. I've worked on a variety of projects from indie games, voice games, AAA, and film. My most recent projects include Say No! More - an indie title that I did both sound and music for, and was nominated for IGF's Excellence in Audio award 2021, and Godfall - a PS5 launch game I did additional sound design for through contracting with A Shell in the Pit. 

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Some of my favorite types of sounds to design are creatures and gore so I'd love to work on a horror game at some point! I also gained a lot of experience making anime and comedic sfx thanks to Say No! More. My favorite projects tend to be the ones where I have a lot of flexibility to experiment creatively and challenge me to learn new skills. 

 

To get into some more detail about the Say No! More examples in my reel, I'd like to share some of my thought processes behind designing those sounds. Some things I found interesting as I was learning how to make comedic sfx was that a lot of the design decisions I made revolved around balancing overwhelming and underwhelming, and sometimes bad quality sound results in good quality gameplay (and vice versa). I think this boils down to comedy often lying in either subverting expectations or recalling established joke references.

 

In my reel you can see what I think are some of the funnier sounds I made - the impact sounds when NPCs are hit with a "No!" and the NPC footsteps. I think the impact sounds are really funny because they sound pretty violent but all of the visuals are super silly to counteract that. I made the decision pretty early on for all impact sounds to sound really over the top - which you can hear in other moments like explosions or destructible impacts as well. When I was making the NPC impact sounds though, I started out with pretty realistic sounding thuds and it was sort of falling flat. Almost as a joke a I decided to compress the shit out of them and really harshly put them through a limiter to make them super loud and in your face, and it turned out to be really funny so I kept it. That was the first time throughout production that I realized that bad quality sounds sometimes actually would create more satisfying gameplay and a funnier experience. 

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Another one of my favorite sounds from that game are the NPC and player footsteps. I think they were actually the first sound that I designed for the game. I knew that they would be ubiquitous and needed to be relatively inoffensive because of that. I wanted to stay away from anything realistic that might draw attention to the unrealistic walking animations, and thought something cute and bubbly would be relatively subtle while adding some character. What I discovered after implementing them was that they actually did draw attention to the walking animation, but in a good way. The silly and staccato bubbly sound combined with the really stiff animations made for a really great comedic/cute combination. They almost sort of set a tone for the game - implying that you shouldn't take any character you meet or the game itself too seriously.