A pickup sound you can hear a thousand times

The pickup sound is the most played sound in a gathering game. Every log, stone and flower that lands in your bag plays it, so over an evening you hear it thousands of times, and a sound that's charming on the first pickup can be grating by the hundredth. In Mytheria, our pixel-art co-op game, the pickup sound is a soft plop, and this is how we keep it pleasant.

How do you make a pickup sound that doesn't get annoying?

Use several real recordings of the same kind of sound instead of one, and never play the same one twice in a row. Keep each one short, with no silence at the start, so it plays exactly when the item arrives. When many items arrive at once, play only a few of them, using a short cooldown, so a burst stays soft.

The short answer

How Mytheria's pickup sound works:

• Eleven real recordings are cut from two recordings of plops, with nothing synthesised.
• All eleven play before any repeats, and never the same one twice in a row.
• The variety comes from the recordings themselves, without pitch shifting.
• Each cut begins within about a hundredth of a second of the sound.
• Each one is about a fifth of a second long.
• A cooldown of 0.09 seconds and a limit of two at once keep a big haul soft.
• An item that doesn't fit in the bag makes no sound.

Record the sound, then cut it up

Mytheria's plop comes from two recordings shared freely on Freesound: "Plop sound made with my mouth" by BlueSiren, and "Pop or bloop" by ScratchnSniff, a string of separate pops. One cut comes from the first and ten from the second. Each cut is about a fifth of a second long, with the low rumble filtered out, a one-millisecond fade in and a short fade out, and no change to its pitch.

The cuts are trimmed so the sound starts almost at once, with the first audible moment between 0.6 and 12.2 milliseconds into each file. A pickup sound that starts late seems to belong to something else.

Shuffle the recordings

Picking a random recording each time repeats more than you'd think: with eleven sounds, the same one comes up twice in a row about one time in eleven. Mytheria uses a shuffle bag instead, like dealing from a deck. All eleven are shuffled, played one by one, and reshuffled when the bag is empty, and a new bag never starts with the sound that just played, so every plop differs from the one before it.

Let a big haul stay soft

When a rock breaks and four stones fly into your bag at once, four plops at the same moment sound like one loud click. So the pickup sound has a cooldown of 0.09 seconds and plays at most two at a time, and items that arrive inside that window are counted without a sound. The text above your head still counts every one.

This is one real gathering run, its sound rendered through the game's own mixer from the run's own events, in three versions: as the game plays it, with only one recording, and with no cooldown. Turn your sound on:

▶ Play with sound

Turn your sound on, play, then switch the sound

As in the gameOne recordingNo cooldown

Pair it with what you see

The plop plays when the item reaches your bag, at the same moment you see it arrive. The sounds of the hits before it are in game sound effects, and how the items fly to you in loot drops that feel good to pick up.

Use it in your own game

The player that follows these rules is free to use: Shuffle SFX, a Godot 4 add-on with the shuffle bag, the cooldown, the voice limits and voices kept for important sounds. It's MIT licensed, so you can drop it into any project.

A checklist for a pickup sound

• Use several recordings of one sound.
• Shuffle them like a deck, and never repeat one back to back.
• Get the variety from the recordings instead of pitch shifts.
• Trim every cut so the sound starts at once.
• Keep each one short.
• Thin out bursts with a short cooldown and a voice limit.
• Play it when the item lands in the bag.
• Stay silent when nothing was really picked up.