At the Independend Gaming Source I discovered this tiny tool, called SFXR. It is a soundgenerator for retro-game like soundeffects, that you are familiar with by playing hundreds of classic games. It basically has three oscillators sinewave, sawtooth, squarewave and a noise generator. With various parameters like vibrato, pitch and filter settings you can quickly customize you sound settings, play around with it and get squeaky effects within seconds. A very nice feature is, that you can use some random generators. They are random in constrains, so the results will come on in some good default fashion for most used and effective sound like “explosion”, “pickup” or “shoot”.

Ok, now. You selected a sound, but want some variation? No problem. Example: you have three kinds of shooting sounds and want them just to differ a little bit. You can edit or select one and then hit the “Mutate” three times. This will automatically generate parameters that will sound similar to the initial sound, but not the same. Generate your similar sounds, write them on disk and you are done.

The author of this tiny application ‘DrPetter’ made this tool for the website Ludumdare, where they held the fast paced gaming competition LD48. He complained about the fact, that so many entries were without sounds. That’s why he wrote this app to help the contributors get their sounds. In his own words, the SFXR is:

“…if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects.”

DrPetter

And in fact, the soundeffects are good, but a little thin and I bet that now thousands of games will come out with this remarkable sound tool. So don’t forget to fatten up your sounds with some special techniques and recipes, so that your sound makes a difference. And don’t tell anybody about them.

Read an interview with Tomas Pettersson on his SFXR.