Arcade Variations SFX
=====================

11 8-bit takes for one event played over and over — square and pulse waves run
through a 5-bit crusher. WAV masters plus OGG.

Arcade Variations SFX is a 11-sound set built from square and pulse waves run
through a 5-bit crusher. It is meant to sound like an arcade cabinet or a
handheld from the 8-bit era, and every clip was synthesised from scratch for
this pack — no sampled material, no library content, no model output — which
is what makes it safe to hand over under a licence you can actually ship with.

Pitch moves in hard steps rather than glides, there is no reverb anywhere in
the set, and the sample rate is deliberately decimated — the grain you hear is
the quantiser, not a filter imitating one.

This is the most requested thing in game audio and the thing free packs almost
never ship. A footstep played identically reads as cheap within about four
steps, and the fix is not a runtime pitch randomiser, it is genuinely
different takes. Each take here differs in transient timing, filter position
and noise seed, and the spread is measured: far enough apart to hear, close
enough to still be the same object.

The set covers 11 files totalling 1.3 seconds, from 33 ms (ui-click-04) to
0.23 s (coin-02). Levels are matched across it: each clip peaks at -1 dBFS
with silence trimmed from both ends and a 5 ms fade, so you can drop the
folder into one mixer group and set a single volume instead of balancing them
one at a time.

Files are 44.1 kHz mono, 16-bit WAV masters with OGG Vorbis alongside, in wav/
and ogg/ folders. 6 of the 11 clips are short enough that the OGG comes out
larger than the WAV, because Vorbis carries about 4 kB of codebook header per
file; the set is 111 kB as WAV against 66 kB as OGG. Mix and match — take
whichever file is smaller per clip. The WAV is the master either way — reach
for it if you are going to pitch-shift or process further, because re-encoding
a lossy file after processing is where artefacts come from.

Good fit for pixel-art platformers, roguelikes and anything with a chiptune
score.

HOW TO USE

  - Load the takes as an array and pick without immediate repetition rather
    than uniformly at random; true random repeats often enough to be noticed.
    A shuffled bag is the usual implementation and it costs nothing.
  - Unity: drag the ogg/ folder into your project and set Load Type to
    "Decompress on Load" for anything under half a second, "Compressed in
    Memory" for the rest.
  - Godot: the OGG files import as AudioStreamOggVorbis with no setup — wire
    one to an AudioStreamPlayer and leave the volume at 0 dB, since the set is
    already levelled.
  - Every clip starts on its transient with no leading silence, so you can
    trigger them directly without an offset and they land tight against the
    input that caused them.

License: CC0-1.0 — see LICENSE.txt
Page: https://www.colorosse.com/assets/audio/sfx/arcade-variations-sfx
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
