Now that we have improved our game visually, with particles, we will add some sounds and a music in our project. It’s very simple in Unity but it’s still a very important part of a game.

You will learn where to find sounds and music, pick some, and play them in our game via a script.

Finding sounds and musics

Damien (not so) recently participated in an interesting subject on Stack Exchange about this topic.

Based on our knowledge, a game developer can:

• Buy sounds.
• Hire/Know a musician.
• Use free sounds from sound banks (like FindSounds or Freesound).
• Record his own sounds.

Or Damien’s favorite:

• Create chiptune (8-bit) sounds using BFXR (based on SFXR but with a web version that is very useful)

For musics, it depends of what you want:

• Jamendo has a ton of artists. Be careful with the licenses for commercial uses.
• Bosca Ceoil is a simple software from Terry Cavanagh to make musics

Assets for the tutorial

Create or find an explosion and a shot sound. If you are lazy, you can use ours:

• Download the player shot sound
• Download the enemy shot sound
• Download the explosion sound

We will use one of the track of The Great Paper Adventure by Spintronic for this tutorial:

• Download Spintronic - Firecrackers

Import in Unity

Drag the 4 elements in the “Sounds” folder.

And… that’s all!

Playing music

To play a music, simply drag the song into the “Hierarchy”.

Observe the “Mute” checkbox. It can help when you do a lot of tests.

Playing sounds

You could proceed like for the music. But sounds need to be triggered at the right time in the game.

For that, we propose a simple solution. Just like for the “SpecialEffectsHelper” code, we will have a helper script for sounds that you can call from everywhere.

This new script is called “SoundEffectsHelper”:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

/// <summary>
/// Creating instance of sounds from code with no effort
/// </summary>
public class SoundEffectsHelper : MonoBehaviour
{

  /// <summary>
  /// Singleton
  /// </summary>
  public static SoundEffectsHelper Instance;

  public AudioClip explosionSound;
  public AudioClip playerShotSound;
  public AudioClip enemyShotSound;

  void Awake()
  {
    // Register the singleton
    if (Instance != null)
    {
      Debug.LogError("Multiple instances of SoundEffectsHelper!");
    }
    Instance = this;
  }

  public void MakeExplosionSound()
  {
    MakeSound(explosionSound);
  }

  public void MakePlayerShotSound()
  {
    MakeSound(playerShotSound);
  }

  public void MakeEnemyShotSound()
  {
    MakeSound(enemyShotSound);
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Play a given sound
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="originalClip"></param>
  private void MakeSound(AudioClip originalClip)
  {
    // As it is not 3D audio clip, position doesn't matter.
    AudioSource.PlayClipAtPoint(originalClip, transform.position);
  }
}

Add it to the “Scripts” game object, and fill its fields with the sound clips:

Then, do:

1. SoundEffectsHelper.Instance.MakeExplosionSound(); in “HealthScript”, just after the particle effect.
2. SoundEffectsHelper.Instance.MakePlayerShotSound(); in “PlayerScript”, just after weapon.Attack(false);.
3. SoundEffectsHelper.Instance.MakeEnemyShotSound(); in “EnemyScript”, just after weapon.Attack(true);.

Start the game and listen. Yeah, we have a music and sounds now!

Next Step

We just learned how to use sounds and music in our game.

We have a pretty good basis for a shmup game now. You can make a longer level and you will nearly get the demo we showed you in the introduction.

You could start making your own graphics and add enemies or background elements. You could even begin to implement a boss at the end of the level. It’s a bit more complex but the challenge and the design decisions are really interesting.

We are far from a complete game, but we will stop here for the gameplay and game stage.

In the next chapter, we will add menus so we can start and restart this hardcore level.