Alien Equation iPhone App | Funner Labs

Alien Equation is a math game targeted at grade school children for the iPhone and iPad.

While it wasn’t my first time designing sound for games, it  was my first time designing sound for an iOS app.

There were a couple challenges before I even started working on the audio.  The first was figuring out how to get the game on my Pro Tools machine and run it.  This required me to install the iOS sdk + X Code so that I could run an iPhone simulator on my computer.

The simulator looks just like an iPhone, except it’s in software format.  The developers provided a version of the game which I could compile on my machine.  I just had to load the sounds and compile the game. This is where the fun began.

We decided to use dropbox since the developers were all working remotely.  Any new updates to the game would automatically get pushed to me so I was assured to have the latest version of the game.

I worked closely with the developers and defined “sound events” with them.  We agreed upon a naming convention for particular events.  So, for instance, when the game starts all of the tiles drop down — we called that “tile_drop” and I created a file with the equivalent name “tile_drop.caf”.

Even though games are non-linear and have event based sounds, I needed some sort of visual reference to work against when creating sounds in Pro Tools. The developers were kind enough to render out some video of the game during play so that I could design a set of sounds offline that would sound cohesive when blended together during game play.

Of particular creative note was designing the voice of the guide in the game. We went through several different version as the developers were very particular about what the character sounded like. I created a couple different versions of his voice based on my real voice. I recorded myself and then processed ti to send more robotic. If the player got a high score, the robot would cheer. If time was running out, the character would say “uh-oh” and start to sound agitated.

If you want to try the game out for yourself you can find it on the app store link
here.

This youtube video is from a reviewer that I found on the web.  Although the music, which I did not do, drowns out some of the sound effects at times, the video does a decent job of highlighting some of the sound effects work that I did.