The instruments
A loop-authoring workstation and a persisted-verdict auditioner, built for SFX and VFX craft
Two home-grown tools, built because general-purpose ones didn’t fit the actual problem — the instruments behind one game’s sound and effects, and each instrument’s output ships in it. All four faces of them run in the browser:
- The audio DAW — 167 cues, 7 tracks, loop authoring, and a WAV export that carries its loop points.
- The SFX take composer — the take-audition half: A/B generated takes against references through an effects rack.
- The VFX audition gallery — 117 effect candidates with the verdict, note and per-pass history behind each.
- The VFX build-out report — a six-wave build narrated with its renders embedded.
The SFX side exists because Godot reads WAV loop points from the smpl chunk but ignores
OGG LOOPSTART/LOOPLENGTH tags entirely — so the DAW authors both, with its own WAV encoder
written to emit smpl. Underneath, every sound effect is synthesized from primitives —
square, pulse, triangle, sine, noise, the noise generator reproducing the real NES
noise-channel clock timing — with a three-tier override chain that lets a recorded or generated
sound replace the synth version at any of roughly 140 call sites with zero caller-code changes.
The VFX side authors effects as data records against a fixed engine (18 shapes, 21 flipbook animations) rather than one script per effect, reviewed through the gallery. Across four dated review passes: 117 candidates, 154 review-history entries, verdicts of 93 kept / 57 tweak / 4 killed. The review system’s own validator deliberately constructs a broken test case and requires itself to catch it before it will validate anything real.
Cast the effects yourself — the
game build boots straight into its FX Lab: ←/→ picks a spell, Space casts it at the
terrain, and Tab flips to the liquid studio, where a right-click pours water.
Both are part of a private personal-project repository.