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Creating SFX (Jumps) - Pico-8 Music Tutorial #47

Added 2019-01-28 15:00:03 +0000 UTC

A tutorial on creating jump SFX for your game. Hope you enjoy!

Attached is the video file, the Pico-8 cart with 32 different jump sounds (complete list below), and a .zip file with all the jump sounds as a .wav file . As I write more sounds, I’ll update this post.

Something I don’t mention in the tutorial is if you need jump sounds in the first place. Does your game even need them? I can think of a few reasons why you wouldn’t want them:

Take up too much sonic space
Distracting
Causes music and/or other sounds to cut out

I found a few popular games that don’t use jump sounds.

In any case, most games DO use jump sounds. As I’m writing them in Pico-8, I generally experiment with:

Different volume tails
Different SPDs
Different instruments
Different octave
Different frequency range
Different attacks

In the tutorial video, I improvise through some of these variations. Here’s a list of all the SFX in the cart, including where they’re from:

00 Alpine Alpaca (Jump + Landing)
01 Bathos
02 Bombers Run
03 Dank Tomb (Jump + Landing)
04 Kid Bludd
05 Nanoman
06 Shoot Stuff
07 Witch n Wiz
08 Secret Santa
09 The Lair
10 Fez (Jump)
11 Fez (Land)
12 WonderBoy III (SMS)
13 WonderBoy III remake (mouse jump)
14 WonderBoy III remake (jump)
15 WonderBoy III remake (lion jump)
16 Celeste
17 Super Mario Bros (small jump)
18 Super Mario Bros (big jump)
19 Kirby
20 Sonic
21 Alex Kidd
22 Super Mario World
23-31 Jump tutorial

At the end of the video, there’s a short video compilation of games with jump sounds. I tried my best recreating those sounds in Pico-8. Here's where I got the video footage from: