Sounds Good

Today's comic was a lot of fun to create. If you haven't seen it yet, go there right away. You won't regret it. It's much more entertaining than this blog.

If you're still reading, it means you've either already looked at the comic or you just ignored my advice in the first paragraph. Let's move on.

So the third frame in the comic is a frog dodgeball game. Every time you click (or touch) it launches a ball at the frogs. If they get hit, their agility score goes down. It's really pointless. But still, throwing red balls at frogs as they hop past is strangely entertaining.

There's a lot of good programming topics that came up while I was making it. I added animation event emitters so that I could use a listener pattern for the frogs' paths. I added animation that changes the image of an object as it moves around on the screen. I added collision detection that uses jQuery selectors. All good stuff.

Creative Commons Licensed Sounds

But the one thing I would like to mention here today is where I get the sound effects. The sound the page makes when you successfully hit a frog is the same sound I used in my GitHub Game Off 2015 game entry for when Business Frog gets hit by an apple. I got it and all my other sound effects from Freesound.org.

Previously, I've mentioned how I sometimes get SVG clipart from OpenClipart.org. Freesound is like the same thing, but for sounds. All of the sound effects on Freesound are licensed under one of the Creative Commons license agreements. Many completely free, having been donated to the public domain. Most are licensed by Attribution, which means you just need to give credit to the creator. There are vast amounts of sound effects that are perfect for the kinds of small web-based games that I like to create.

You'll need to create an account in order to download the sounds, but you can listen to them right on the web until you find the perfect one. Unlike with OpenClipart, I'm not really capable of creating any kind of audio files that anyone would want - so I don't upload my own work. But if you do make your own sound effects, by all means share them! The world will be a better place for it!

One final thought. The sound files on Freesound.org tend to come in a variety of formats. Typically I need them in .mp3 or .ogg format for my games. I've found Audacity to be a great tool for my simple audio conversion and editing needs.

Here's another link to that comic, in case you missed it.

Amphibian.com comic for 15 April 2015