I would like to find out how much it costs to commission custom game sounds for a small-sized game. If any of you have had such experiences, I would appreciate it a lot if you could share some numbers. Also, if you can recommend a sound studio, that would be great. Thx.

Some charge up to $40 per sound....but I use two seperate people (one I have worked with for over a year) that each charge $5/sound. They have great quality and offered me multiple variations...Unfortunatelly they are quite busy at the moment.

For the name of one who may have some time, feel free to email me.

Make sure never to pay more than $5, as you can get top quality sound for this sort of price.

Alex
alex@weaponstudios.com

I don't think I'm alone in saying that the biggest challenge I've faced in game development is finding quality, royalty free sounds and music. I'm budgeting a heap of cash in the New Year to buy up as many music and sound resources as I can. These are 2 that I'm looking at specifically:

For anyone able to splurge you can probably satisfy all of your present and future sound effects needs with "The SFX Kit" by Tommy Tellarico (of Electric Playground fame). The $700 price tag may seem a bit much to pay all at once but with 20,000 sound effects on 8 CDs you're bound to find anything you're looking for.

http://www.sound-ideas.com/sfx-kit.html

If you are more budget conscious then check out the indiesfx collection. Their CDs are priced pretty reasonably and the sampler FX seem good.

http://www.indiesfx.co.uk/

I don't know if I could get behind paying on a sound by sound basis. The time and effort involved in contracting out single sounds seems like a dead loss to me when you could just grab a CD off your shelf and find what you need within minutes.

Now if only someone could convince the guys at Future Developments or Game Noise to make a bunch of game music tracks and release them on CD instead of having people pay on a song by song basis. I need music!

I got "The Hollywood Edge" sound collection from Hollywood Edge for 300 bucks for 4 CDs. they're all good sounds and I've used a lot of them in RDF and RBD. Over the years I've used it for a lot of different things and it has been totally worth it.

Thank you all very much for your input.

KNau, the trouble with music compilations is it's more obvious to the listener that the material has been used before.

However, I will do music for food ;)

When I purchased Sound Forge it came with a library of about 1000 sounds. Most of them are mediocre quality but with all the special effects you get with the program you can spice them up quite nicely. You'll need to be ready to put in some experimentation time though...