Game Audio: Capturing sounds for board games (and a brand new SFX library)

Introduction

To coincide with the release of the Board Game SFX library on A Sound Effect I thought it might be interesting to write a little article about how it came about and how I went about creating it.

All sounds in the library were originally created for use in the physics based multiplayer board game ‘Tabletop Simulator‘. You can check out a video of some of the sounds implemented in-game below.

It was quite an interesting and unique challenge, often in game sound design you are creating sounds for abstract UI elements or spells, creatures or whatever, where there is no real definitive answer to what it’s supposed to sound like.

However with Tabletop Simulator, everyone is incredibly familiar with how these things *should* sound, everyone knows what a dice on a table sounds like or a chess piece on a board, so it was quite important to create a convincing and lifelike simulation in the game so as not to break the ‘illusion’. Of course it was never going to sound 100% perfect unless we spent way more time than was necessary, but I was pretty pleased with the results!

Since finishing the Tabletop Simulator project I have found myself using the sounds recorded for it in a whole variety of situations, from UI sound design to layering up and sweetening other sound effects so thought it would be a good idea to make them available to other sound designers out there.
 

Choosing the props

I’m gonna be honest, the main deciding factor in which props to use for the recordings was whether or not I had them in the house! That being said I did make sure that everything I used had a nice character to the sound and would be satisfying to hear in-game.

Piece types

Going clockwise on that picture the various piece types are:

Playing cards – Some basic cards.
Wooden piece – Chess piece from an antique chess set.
Poker chip – I didn’t have any poker chips so I used this piece from Connect 4. Anyone who has played that game will know the pieces have quite a distinctive sound!
Plastic dice – 6 sides, 6 numbers.
Metal piece – A metal ‘Sully’ from Pixar Monopoly. This library is in no way affiliated with the good people at Pixar, Disney or Parker Brothers :)
Plastic piece – A hotel from Monopoly. The hollow shape gives a nice character to the sound and made it sound undeniably ‘plastic’
Wooden block – The innards of this poor unfortunate soul.
Glass marble – Surprisingly hard to find in the shops these days, the world has moved on I guess (to multiplayer physics simulations of marbles).

These piece types managed to cover all the different piece types in the game, with many of them being used for multiple purposes. The metal piece sounds were also used for the metal dice and ended up sounding pretty convincing!

As well as the pieces there were 4 surface types:

Wooden board – An antique wooden chess board.
Felt surface – The felt lined underside of an antique wooden chess board.
Card board – A Monopoly board.
Glass table – This was a tricky one as I don’t actually own a glass table and thought it was probably overkill to buy one for this project, so I ended up using one of the shelves out of my fridge.
 

Recording Setup and Method

Once I had all the props together the actual recording process was pretty straightforward. I set up a little ‘booth’ in the corner of the studio using a room divider and heavy curtains to block out any background noise, which was quite important as a lot of the sounds I would be recording were very quiet.

Then it was just a case of hitting record and then either dropping or rolling the piece around on the surface or hitting it together with another piece in my hand (I used my hand as it ensured only the sounds of the pieces themselves would be heard). I made sure not to throw the pieces too hard and to let them move around naturally as to get the most realistic sound.
 

Processing

Again, because I wanted to achieve as realistic and natural a sound as possible, I tried to keep the processing to a minimum. I just used a high-pass filter to take out any unwanted low end mess and the occasional slight notch to reduce any harsh frequencies (these only really occurred in the plastic and glass marble sounds).

The main part was listening through the long takes and deciding which individual hits to go for. I tried to get a good mix between simple short transients and ones with a bit more of a rattle or character to them. It was important to pick the sounds I felt ‘summed up’ the piece best, e.g. with the metal piece I made sure to get the ones that had the most metallic ringing tone in there. However since they were going to be hooked up to a physics simulation, they still had to remain quite short as you never know how/when they’re going to be triggered.

Sliced hits (my favourite)

After slicing out the hits I gave each one a tiny fade in and fade out to avoid any clicks and normalised everything to 0db. Volume was automated by the game engine depending on the speed of the object so it was important that they all had the same relative volume.
 

Conclusion

All in all I was pretty happy with how the sounds turned out, I felt they sound good and definitely capture the sound of the objects they are intended to represent. I hope they are of some use to you other sound designers out there!

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