The sound of flushing a toilet

Free SFX goodness at the end of this post!

AudioHack
The audio listener is tied to a focal point near the ground, instead of directly to the camera.

This week I decided to work a bit on the audio to make this trailer for shits and giggles.

9 years ago I started making rap music (pretty typical gamedev hobby) and I got pretty okay at composing, mixing and recording and stuff like that. I also spend an ass-ton of money on recording equipment, software and instruments and about 4 years ago I stopped, because of just life happening. So to avoid having wasted a lot of money and time I’ll be recording all sound effects and compose all music for Software Inc. You can listen to stuff I made some years ago on Myspace.

For now, I recorded water boiling for the coffee machine, a refrigerator opening and closing, myself saying “bla bla bla”(not included in download) for meetings, punching on the keyboard, pouring water down a toilet and flushing, and my computer fan.

I had a problem adding the sound effects to the game though, since the only way to really hear them clearly was to position the camera directly above what you wanted to hear, and it seemed pretty unnatural. So I decided to move the listener away from the camera and down to the ground, to where the camera is focusing.

Normally, when I want to do RTS like camera movements, I add an empty focal object on the ground and add the camera as its child transform, pointing towards the focal object. When I want to move the camera around I just move the focal object on the ground. Rotation works by rotating the focal object, so the camera rotates with it, always pointing towards the focal point. Zooming is just moving the camera closer on the local z axis. So, my audio listener hack only required me to add the audio listener as a child transform of my focal object.

Anyway, I wanted to share my sound effects with you, since they were pretty easy to make, but required a lot of expensive gear you might not have. You are free to modify the files and use them any way you want, and you don’t even have to give me credit or anything like that. CC0 license.

Download here

The download is a 400 KB zip file containing 10 .ogg files.