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Every sound, cleared for sale
Before Helmand Ops can be sold, every one of its 90 sounds has to be cleared for it. Four couldn't be, so I rebuilt them from free recordings and picked the replacements by ear.
A game you sell has to have the right to every sound in it. Section Command: Helmand Ops has 90 sound files, and before it goes anywhere near a store page I wanted to know where every one of them came from and what its licence says.
The audit
A few are my own recordings, mine outright: the A-10's gun run and its roar going over, the Chinook coming in and sitting on the ground, the L96's shot and its bolt, an RPK on full auto, the crack of a rifle. Most of the rest come from Freesound and Pixabay. I'd chosen them, cut them and mixed them, and now I traced every one back to its original upload and its licence, matching them by the sound itself where the file names had changed along the way.
86 of the 90 were fine. Four weren't: the loops for men wading, digging, and driving in iron pickets and wooden stakes, which came from the BBC's sound effects archive. Its licence covers personal, educational and research use. Not a game for sale.
Rebuilding them
A new name doesn't change a licence, so the four had to go. I replaced them with recordings released as CC0, free for any use, from Freesound. To pick them I put together a page to hear them side by side: the old loop against each candidate, a mix of the ones I ticked layered the way the game uses them, and a switch to flip between old and new at the same moment.
Each new loop is built from the picks: the recordings cut into single steps, strokes and blows, then put back together as three men at work, at the old loop's loudness, so nothing else in the mix had to change. The wading has the water round the men's legs under their steps. The iron pickets come from two people's recordings of the blows alone, jedg's and Pagey1969's. Thank you to them and to everyone who puts their recordings out as CC0.
Every sound in the game is now cleared for selling, and the playtest on this site uses the new ones. If you hear something that sounds wrong, or something that's missing, tell me: hello@tacticalchicken.games.
Who makes this: Section Command: Helmand Ops is made by one person, Jack Mustard, who is the whole of Tactical Chicken Studios.