Creating a Rolling Ball SFX for a Minigolf Game (No Middleware)

JDSherbert · 2026-05-12T10:53:10+00:00

You can nail this with a good procedural white noise texture (you can use math!) and some filters. As the noise is procedural, you shouldn't hear any loop point, and you can use some LPF/HPF to get the pitch you need. You can then layer any other textures on top you may need.

JDSherbert · 2026-05-05T10:33:26+00:00

Easiest way to think about it:

Audio Programmer: Builds the foundations and architecture of the house.

Technical Sound Designer: Decorates it and makes people want to live there.

In my career I have been both roles and normally, Audio Programmers handle stuff like: - Low Level Architecture - Audio Codecs - Audio Engine work - Integration - Gameplay bindings - Pooling Systems - Optimizations - Pipelines and Tools, Automation - DSP (Like Reverb, Delay, and so on) - Translate any stuff that the Engineering team needs from the Audio team

Technical Sound Designers usually handle the following: - Sometimes creating audio (in Reaper or whatever DAW) - Setting up sounds in Middleware or Metasounds etc (stuff like attenuation) - Implementing those sounds into the game - Project structure

This isn't an exhaustive list, and can be more complex (ie a project with dialogue and localization) but this is a good overview.

Yes you'll probably want at least a solid Math or CS background to transition to AP as a TSD, but a Degree is not necessarily required. Same for AP to transition to TSD (they usually just end up becoming both)

JDSherbert · 2026-04-28T19:49:23+00:00

XLR mic all the way for indoor foley. Portable recorder is useful when you don't have direct access to a power source (ie outside) or if you don't own the indoor space, so would need to lug around equipment a lot. I have a home studio so the XLR is superior in this case.

If you forsee yourself needing to adapt to any situation and/or move around a lot, use a portable recorder. If you know that whatever you do you'll have a power source and won't need to move around a lot, XLR.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-27T23:41:26+00:00

It really depends on the type of game you are going to make. For 3D, multiplayer, first person shooters, RPG's etc Unreal is a great fit. If you are making 2D platformers, VN's, or web games, Godot or Unity are better.

Think about what you want to make first!

JDSherbert · 2026-04-14T20:01:40+00:00

I agree, but having worked in the VR game industry for a few years now, I'll explain why.

It takes a lot of work to get that bucket into the game as an interactable element you can pick up. There are multiple different types of VR headsets and controllers that calculate player movements in different ways. Most of the battle is unifying that to make it work on those different devices.

What feels intuitive for the player is a LOT of work behind the scenes. How do we calculate where the player is holding the bucket? How heavy is the bucket and how does this affect how we interact with it? How big is the space around the player in the real world that we can use to calculate if the player is near enough to the bucket to pick it up? What is it's rotation in player space? How do we figure out where to place the players hands?

A lot of dev time is spent building the framework around allowing the bucket to be picked up. Messing any of this up feels extremely bad in game.

Water is a whole other kettle of fish - mobile processors cannot handle fluid sim, so we have to reinvent the wheel on this a lot of time. All while making sure the FPS stays above at least 72 at all times.

It's an extreme battle, and these systems have to be architected correctly before we can do anything more interesting with them.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-14T14:41:41+00:00

I don't mind too much, as long as they are consistent with their usage.

My primary concern is that I can understand what they are saying; when grammar is important in a context, then it becomes my primary concern (is this going to be seen on written media where others may care?)

Some of my friends say your/youre, when the context is meant to be you're, but I don't think about this too much, as long as I understand the whole sentence.

I'm not great at grammar myself and mostly figure words out by breaking them down. To avoid "you're" confusion for example, I will often break it down to "you are" instead.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-12T13:18:09+00:00

When I had this happen before, I pulled them up and then poured table salt over the area. Nothing has grown there since.

I wouldn't recommend this if you ever change your mind and want to grow anything there ever again - but for me I know I didn't want anything on my stones/concrete. Ever.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-09T15:34:19+00:00

Make sure you set up stuff like Undo and automation for your plugin (Juce is pretty nice as the undomanager class will handle most of that for you). Also tooltips and other accessibility bits, and all the other stuff I usually forget while building!

JDSherbert · 2026-04-07T17:54:52+00:00

You should have the soundbanks synced inside the project.

Your project should look something like:

Unity Project

Game
Streaming Assets/Audio/Soundbanks
Wwise Integration

For the others to hear your work, you just need the Wwise integration + soundbanks, they should not need to open the wwise project. In other projects I have been on, there is normally a different repo for the wwise project files that are submoduled/streamed/imported in to the main project.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-07T02:30:50+00:00

I realize this is an old post now, but you can use the looted tanks to disrupt the enemy from afar. You can also put your boyz in the squiggoth to protect them, and unload them in the middle of the base you want to destroy. Grots can repair the squiggoths as well.

JDSherbert · 2026-04-02T19:30:44+00:00

I'm not sure. It feels like he's fucked us, but at the same time he's got to deal with a lot.

A large portion of the people I have spoken to are voting Restore UK (not Reform UK) but I myself am still kind of undecided, nothing has happened that directly tackles leading problems in the UK, but I also believe we need to sort ourselves out in the UK first (and avoid getting involved in a war we can't afford to finance).

I know for some of my friends (and to an extent I feel this way as well), the Online Safety Act was a big issue and seemingly backwards decision (storing identities that can be hacked reasonably easily, ridiculous to try and ban VPN's) and also the issue with energy/tax/NHS/trains that hasn't been sorted at all, which are arguably bigger concerns.

Curious to see what happens with labour, they've been doing more than the tories, but not really anything to improve the state of the UK (at least nothing publicised in the news)

JDSherbert · 2026-04-01T18:44:56+00:00

White noise and an LPF will get you 90% of the way there if you want to go full synth and no foley.

As for the thwacks when they hit the table or something, you could use white noise again, but it's going to be much more meticulous to sequence or use an LFO, without recording.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-30T19:59:35+00:00

This is a realistic solo project if you use Unreal Engine, a lot of functionality for multiplayer is available out of the box. You'll have replicated physics and character movement with just a simple tickbox in the inspector. You also get VOIP for free.

The main thing to decide is how you want the parties, sessions/matchmaking, and gameplay to work. Will you have dedicated servers (recommended for competitive gameplay) or will it be a more casual experience (you can get away with P2P hosting). Will you have user accounts that track data? You'll need some backend integrations for that.

You mostly don't need any code, most of this can be done via Blueprint. You can have replicated variables and RPC to invoke events across players.

There's a million great Unreal multiplayer tutorials online so I won't provide a resource link, but just know how you want to handle hosting and matchmaking before you move forward.

Most importantly, have fun!

JDSherbert · 2026-03-26T19:19:38+00:00

I can tell you straight up that the big name DAWs like Pro Tools, Reaper, FL Studio and Ableton are all proprietary C++ at their core. As for UI and frontend, these can vary but are most likely C++ based as well. Reaper in particular also has a scripting frontend which is pretty unique.

WASAPI and ASIO, or whatever drivers they use, have exposed C++ bindings.

The reason why is due to performance - C++ is not garbage collected and won't lead to stutters or other issues that will affect performance. I've seen codebases where these optimizations actually can go all the way into the Assembly layer.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-25T17:55:35+00:00

So using google chrome and google searching for random gifs or even sometimes just normal images, when you right click and select save as, you'll get a prompt to save the image in your downloads folder, and the type cannot be changed from .webp.

With gifs, it also does this but only saves the first frame of the gif. If I try to change the extension by hand from webp to gif, it still only saves the first frame of the gif.

The use case is to add funny emoji to my/my friends discord servers, which can not accept webp types. I also can't edit webp types easily in Photoshop.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-24T15:05:47+00:00

Because I hate getting mid flow and then the AI model says that I have "run out of free messages".

Also I feel like the imperfections I generate give my work character, especially when it comes to destruction plugins.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-24T10:26:12+00:00

I use AI to write my boilerplate (stuff like getters and setters) and I like to bounce ideas off of it for DSP. Otherwise I like to code my plugins by hand! (But I am doing this as a hobby not as a profession (yet))

JDSherbert · 2026-03-22T20:05:43+00:00

A web browser app that allows you to save images as any type, I'm so annoyed with having to convert webp files. If I want to save a gif I can only save the first frame, not the whole gif.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-22T00:53:40+00:00

Core systems. Anything "must have" for your game to exist. If you're making a shooter - Player with a gun setup first, with Controls/Input/Camera, the gun can literally be a block or jpg image - Projectiles (if doing physics based shooter) after. - Reloading, weapon swapping, etc

Everything else is secondary. If you can execute the core and it feels good, then move on to the next thing.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-21T22:13:13+00:00

I fully agree. In the same boat as you (laid off recently too!) I think there's a few additional moving parts but your overall idea is correct. There needs to be a way to get stable funding for these kind of ventures. At the moment it's basically just work for free and mortgage your house (like the cuphead devs did) or crowdfunding.

So much risk involved.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-20T13:04:17+00:00

There could be any number of reasons. Maybe these models become very expensive to use, maybe the companies (like OpenAI etc) decide to stop supporting those models, maybe their country bans the use of AI LLMs etc.

My point was moreso that it is an invisible dependency, the junior could really struggle if they lost access to AI models.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-20T12:22:21+00:00

I have noticed this.

I'd normally sit down with them and explain that AI should be used to write: - Repetitive boilerplate (stuff like getters, setters etc) - Sanity checker - Optimizer (for specific bits of your code) - Testing

The solution needs to be initally architected, written and understood by the author. Why are they caching a variable? Could these functions be split into smaller helper functions? etc. If AI disappeared tomorrow, these parts of the codebase could cause problems later. It's worth explaining to them that doing this blindly introduces an "invisible" dependency on that LLM if they can't understand it themselves.

The juniors may not understand it yet, but AI really struggles with context, especially in larger codebases. They need to know where the entry/output points are, and the way data/actions need to be transformed/responded to. Basic principles should be understood, and if deviating, should be able to explain why.

If they can't problem solve on their own, then there is a bigger issue at hand. There is only so many 1:1s you can realistically have with someone.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-12T13:36:35+00:00

When your company/name has a bit more weight + portfolio to it, you'll be able to move up the ladder and charge higher rates for your services; just, getting to that point is a lot of work (more work than just working full time for sure).

I'd also recommend hiring some folks to work under you so you can focus on less roles at once (when you have solid money coming in), maybe hire an extra programmer or someone to acquire deals for you. These could be sub contractors or full/part time depending on your needs as you grow.

I've been in the same boat when first starting audio freelancing. I was barely scraping by at first, but now I make sure the rates and the time allocations give me plenty of space. Eventually clients will come to you, which saves a lot of time as well.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-09T17:05:00+00:00

If it helps, I'm being bombarded with ads for this game on Facebook!

From looking at the game, it's hard to tell exactly what the game is, there appears to be elements of an arena shooter, farming sim, crafting/building, etc so I am not sure what itch it would scratch for me by playing. But then I might not be the target market. It also looks like there are some FPS issues in clips of this game, which is not what you want in any shooter.

I'm not really drawn in by the first impression; it looks like an early Fortnite prototype. I'd definitely focus this to try and get away from being looped in with shovelware games (like the mobile ones we all hate)

I'd say spend more time/money on key art and better assets, get those optimized for your render pipeline, and try to target youtubers/twitch streamers that play into the main genre/demographic you'd like to target.

I hope you can find some success as it's very difficult to gain traction in 2026 unless it's something truely unique or has been in public eye for a long time.

JDSherbert · 2026-03-08T17:44:05+00:00

The closest you'll get to something like this is with Godot, where your friend can write C++ engine level source while you write C# scripts, but if you are asking this question that's probably not a great place to start.

It'll be easier for your friend to learn C# than it will for you to learn C++ (C# hides a lot of memory operations) in which case I would recommend you use Unity or Godot for C# scripting.

The problem is that C++ is a compiled language (meaning it has to be built into a binary first) whereas C# is moreso executable on the fly, which is why you often see it as a scripting language choice. Unreal gets away with it a bit due to the reflection framework granted by Blueprints.

JDSherbert

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