On day four, I add sound effects. There are only a two essential types of sounds:
- Gunshot when the player fires
- Explosion when an enemy blows up
I could add some other effects, such as bullets whizzing by; a sound when powerups appear would be nice and maybe an alarm when health gets low. The original has music, but I think that is over-achieving for this little project.
There are a plenty of free explosion and gunshot sounds online; I pick some from freesound.org, and tweak and cut them in Audacity.
I’m playing all sounds with the Web Audio api. To make them interesting, I add a few variations that may actually be more trouble then they are worth: decreasing volume and delay depending on distance from the player.
What does turn out to be important is not playing too many explosions at once; many simultaneous explosions cause clipping and many very close together just sound like noise, so I introduce a brief delay between explosions when the player hits a bomb. This turns out to be a nice effect. Even with this, though, many explosions simply add up to too loud and still clip, so I use Web Audio to insert a compressor and that mostly gets levels under control.
Next problem is that the gunshots contain some hissing noise as they fade out; it is barely noticeable for a single shot, but becomes irritating when many shots are happening close together. A low-pass filter on the tail of the sounds cleans it up.
Once all the explosion sounds are working, I realize I have a performance problem. At first, I think that Web Audio is causing it, but a few minutes with a profiler tell me that it actually is drawing all the explosion animations when a large bomb goes off. I hadn’t noticed it before only because I did not have so many enemies on the screen at once.
Well, optimization will be a problem for day five.
Should Be Simple 