Audio

An often neglected part of prototyping is adding Audio to your game. This is unfortunate since most Audio will be easy to add, but has a suprisingly positive impact on how your game plays.

Downloading and Adding a Sound Effect.

So far we’ve just been using Assets that were included in the Unity Package. However, it will generally be your responsibility to find these on your own.

Begin by going to sounds-resource.com and searching for Metroid.

Under the Sound Effects tab click the one that’s available: Sound Effect.

Click Download Zip and use your favorite unzipping tool to open the folder. Now we have a number of (unfortunately unnamed) Sound Effects you can use.

Create a new Audio folder and drop all of these files in. While we’re just going to add the shooting sound effect in this tutorial, it will be useful to have all of these once you start working on the other sounds.

Rename Sound Effect (3) to Fire as it will be the effect we use. At some point you may want to rename all of the Sound Effects you’ll need, but it will be up to you to figure out the rest of them.

Assets

Where can I get the music I'll need?

Didn't I just tell you it will be up to you to find your other assets? Google is an invaluable tool.

That being said, you're still reading these expandable sections and I appreciate that, so take this. You'll need Brinstar and ItemRoom (for the last two rooms). You may also want a third track for your custom level.

Setting up

Begin by adding an AudioSource component to the Bullet Prefab

Update the Source to our new Fire sound effect.

Ensure that Play On Awake is True (This should be the case here, but note that sometimes you many not want this).

Inspector

So, I don't need to script when I work on Audio?

In this case, we were able to just use PlayOnAwake, but sometimes you'll need to use more complex logic and call Play() in the AudioSource component.

You'll find that something like the walking Sound Effect will actually be a bit of a challenge to script well.

It should also be noted that the solution we did here, while simple, isn't actually faithful to the original game. The sound effect stops if the bullet is destroyed while it is playing. It may make more sense to have the AudioSource on something like the Player, playing it through scripting.

Conclusion

That’s it for adding our Sound Effect, see how easy it is?

When you’re ready, commit your changes and head over to 11: Morph Ball.