In Man Or Goat you listen to goat noises and decide if they’re a real goat or me doing an impression of a goat. In my last post I explained how I recorded the noises of real goats, but how did I record my goat impressions?

When listening to the 1000+ real goat noises, 25 distinct categories of noises emerged. Goats don’t just bleat. These categories are crucial to the variety of the game’s noises. It was obvious that I needed to record my own goat impressions within the same categories. So here are some examples from the classic “bleat” category, the type of goat noise most people instinctively imitate when asked to make a goat noise (happens a lot) :

But goats make lots of different types of noises not just bleats. For example here is what I call being sick :

Goats also make zombie sounds when they want to :

There are 25 unique categories in total such as horse, I’ll cry, over here, polite laughing, snore, whimper and it tickles. The game has a good range of noises from each category otherwise it’d be repetitive.

Most of the goat impressions were recorded in my car at supermarket car parks or the car park at work. I know, it’s weird, but I had a good laugh doing it and I obviously don’t care much for adult inhibitions at least not when I’m in my car.

I had too many goat impressions

By the time I’d finished recording loads of goat noises for each noise category I had far too many. I only needed the best 500 impressions for the game, but I had 3000 goat impressions! I had personally recorded 3000 goat impressions. Can you say that? Thought not. Loser.

So how do you go through 3000 goat impressions and pick the best ones? I’m a programmer so I wrote a web app which enabled me to :

  • import the noises into a database
  • automatically categorize the noises based on file name convention eg; noises\man\being sick-gareth-car-work car park\ZOOM0008-001.aiff
  • list the noises and rate them between 1 and 10

Writing this noise rating web app wasn’t trivial, but using it was very amusing :

This game is such a stupid idea. Every step of the way brought unforeseen challenges; I guess that’s just game development… :)

Follow me on Twitter for updates.

Download Man Or Goat now from the Apple App Store!

Next Post Previous Post