Let’s be Sound Effects Artists! Create new sound effects to add to movies. Collect sounds around Skillsville, add filters to change the sounds, and add them to a movie! The Beeples will love your new sound effects in their movie!

The beeples of Skillsville are producing movies, but they’ve run into a problem! What does a spaceship sound like? We don’t have a real spaceship, so how can we make a movie about it without knowing what it sounds like? Maybe we can make a monster movie instead… but wait! What sound does a Monster make? Sound Effects Artists in the real world make these all the time, how do they do it??? Can you be Skillsville’s Sound effects artist and THINK DIFFERENTLY to help make movies for the beeples???

Awards

Sound it Out has won 2 Silver Telly Awards for Branded Content: Education and Branded Content Children.

Interesting Problem

How do you create an immersive and replayable experience in a very small footprint?

This this game we were tasked to reduce the overal foot print of the game in order to reduce loading times and so that our game could be cached on the devices kids are playing with. Initially, this design challenge seemed like it would be a serious issue with our game given that the largest assets in the game are sound files and images. However, we came up with a solution to lean on combinations of sound effects in short 3-beat “movies”. In the end we had 12 unique sound effects that kids could use across 3 different movies each with 3 different scenes. This gave us about 1,728 unique combinations for each movie. That said, a movie with just a rooster crowing each time isn’t particularly interesting so we tried to find addiitonal ways to add varations while keeping the overall size of the game down.

Our intital hope was to add additional sounds but that added an art asset and sound asset for each new sound effect. Instead we decided to use audio filters that could be applied to each sound effect at runtime. By adding 5 filters (Normal, Echo, Speed Up, Slow Down, Backwards, and Distortion) we were able to increase the number of unique combinations from 1,728 to about 373,248 unique combinations per movie. This allowed us to keep the overall size of the game down while still providing a fun and replayable experience for players.

As of November 2025, Sound It Out has been played over 1.8 million times on PBS Kids!

Main Goal:

Have players see how the sound effects chosen impact a scene, where those sounds actually come from, and how you can use a few effects to further process those sounds. To be successful, players will have to think differently about how to use the tools they have in order to fulfill the creative goals ahead. The reveal of the movie should be over the top to reflect this.

Client:

Twin Cities Public Television

PBS Kids