Sound Design Reel

Constraint: no original audio, no commercial libraries, and combat that players already know by sound. I built axe hits from metal-on-meat recordings, including a pork shoulder hit with a wrench as the base layer. Shield blocks use a hard-compressed transient with a ringing tail. Enemy screams came from pitched-down voice takes blended with non-commercial animal recordings, tuned until they stopped sounding cartoonish and started reading as pain.

The goal was immediate spell readability. Fire starts with a gas-burner recording pitched down an octave, with synth crackle on top for the magical layer. Ice uses granular synthesis with a slow attack so it feels like it is forming. Lightning hits hard and disappears fast. Each element has a different envelope and texture, so the spell type is clear before the visual fully lands.

Same exercise, opposite directions. The P2000 pistol is foley and field recordings: mechanical clicks, a dry close-mic shot, room reflections added back in post. The real-world layers are recordings I made myself. The sci-fi weapon is pure synthesis and spectral processing. No microphone involved at all. Sounds like electricity arcing through glass. Doing both at once made it really clear how different the two approaches are.

My first sound design project. I replaced all audio for a sci-fi scene: spaceship hum, alarm tones, and mechanical doors. This is where I learned how much timing matters. A door sound 3 frames late looks wrong immediately. I also learned that a spaceship hum is not one sound - it is five or six layers at different frequencies, and if one drops out, the whole thing feels thin.

Classic 1911 pistol. The challenge was matching the iconic COD weapon punch without any sample libraries. I recorded metal clicks and slide actions from my own door hardware and camera shutters, layered them with a compressed transient hit for the actual shot. The tail is a short room reverb bus to sell the space. What I learned here: transient shape matters way more than the body of the sound. Get the attack right and the rest can be almost anything.

PEPS is the non-lethal sonic rifle from Deus Ex. No physical reference - it shoots sound waves. So I went pure synthesis: a sub-frequency sweep for the low-end pressure, a high-frequency whine for the weapon energy, and a burst of filtered noise for the impact. Making it feel like a weapon and not just a pad effect was the hard part. I ended up adding a sharp mechanical click at the start - a mic'd metal switch - and that gave it the physicality it needed.

D.Va's Light Gun fires fast, so each shot has to be tight and punchy or the rhythm breaks. I built a short attack transient from a ceramic tile tap, layered a synth energy sweep underneath, and rotated three slightly pitched versions to avoid the ratta-tat repetition that kills fast-fire weapons. The firing rate is the constraint: each shot has only a short window before the next one plays, so every layer has to breathe in that space.

Sound design for Cloud Gardens, a slow garden-building game. The brief was calm and distant - the opposite of a combat game. I layered field recordings of wind with synth pads from Massive and Analog Lab 5, then ran everything through Waves H-Reverb to push the sounds far away. Plant growth is a soft organic rustle with a pitched-up synth bell on top. Object placement is foley on wood, metal, and stone, processed with Brauer Motion for small spatial movement. Different rule than the redesigns: library samples were allowed here (Soundly, Splice, Freesound) because this was about blend and atmosphere, not building everything from scratch.

Short creature design exercise - build a monster out of layered animal samples and battlefield ambience. Source material: alligator growl, chimpanzee screeches, lion roar, bat chatter. All pitched, time-stretched, and blended together until the individual animals disappear and something new emerges. The background is distant battlefield ambience, radio static, and an orchestral instrumental underneath. The exercise here was about layering and blend, not source creation from scratch.