When you"re developing a game as a team, organization can be pretty challenging. You have to write code so every art asset fits in perfectly. You've probably used yourself ugly squares to represent some character's sprite in early development stages but… What happens with audio? That's when SFXR comes into play.
What is SFXR?
SFXR is a simple sound effect prototyping open source tool. It was initially developed for the 10th Ludum Dare 48h gamedev competition. People neither had the time nor expertise to produce their own SFX so they generated them almost automatically with SFXR.
SFXR only has one big panel in which you can produce your sound effects. Using the left buttons you can select pre-defined sounds for simple actions like shooting, jumping or getting a power-up. If you want more customization it's possible to adjust some sound properties such as speed, wave form and other stuff I have no idea about. You can monitor the current state of your effect by clicking the "Play sound" button. When you"re done, click the "Export .wav" button and that's it!
Downloading SFXR
SFXR is multi platform so you won't have any problems to get it running on your system. Simply, download the correspondent version:
If you want to use the GNU/Linux version you must install the SDL and GTK libraries. For Debian like distributions users, please follow these simple steps:
- Install the dependencies:
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libgtk2.0-dev- Build and install (optional):
make && sudo make installHave fun prototyping
I"m using SFXR for Sion Tower, the strategy action game I"m developing right now and I"m quite happy with it. A colleague of mine who studied sound production is working on the effects for the game. In the meanwhile, testing the sound system with SFXR is working great!