ASMR Sound Grid is a browser game I am building where you tap a tile in a four-by-four grid, listen to the sound hiding under it, and decide whether it is soothing or stressful. The whole game is one HTML file with no server, meant for itch.io and the DHSeaDev arcade. Every sound in it is made by code at run time, and generated sound is very easy to get wrong, so before I listened to any of it I wrote down the rule for when I would quit. Nothing is published yet. The itch.io page and the arcade listing wait until I say go.
How does a round of ASMR Sound Grid work?
You tap a tile and hear its clip. Then you judge it, Soothe or Stress. The game has a hidden answer for each clip and you collect Pass and Fail cards as you go; the first player to three wins. The first version of my concept had the pick itself decide the result, which made the listening pointless. The loop is now Hear, then Judge, and the listening is the game.
The first release is planned to have a mode against the computer, a sandbox where you can play with every sound, a daily challenge, a few themed rounds and pass-and-play for two people. A short Rush mode is in there too. I set Rush to 60 seconds, played it, and found 60 seconds far too long. It is 15 seconds now.
Why are all the sounds generated instead of recorded?
There is no budget, and I want the game to stay a single file that works offline. Recorded clips would mean a pile of audio files, a licence question for each one, and a much heavier download. So the first pass is synthesized with the browser’s audio tools, and the fallback if that fails is free public-domain samples, which I would then have to hunt down and check one by one.
What is the rule for quitting?
The first phase of the build is a sound lab with 14 sounds in it. The kill rule is this: if more than 3 of the 14 sound fake or unpleasant to me, I either switch to public-domain samples or I abandon the game. A game about judging sounds only works if the sounds are believable, and I know how I behave once I am invested. I will find reasons to like a bad sound. So the number was fixed before the first listen, where I could not talk myself out of it afterwards.
I have played early solo and sandbox builds and they worked well enough to keep going. I am not putting a pass or fail count for the 14 here, because I would rather report it once I am sure it is right. It gets its own post.
What changed after I played it?
Two things came straight from playing. The 15-second Rush mode, and the sandbox: it has slots for secret sound mixes, and I decided they have to be usable, not locked placeholders that tease a feature. The plan has since grown. A tutorial and live multiplayer through a lobby are both in the first version now, which reverses my earlier decision to leave them for later. Single-player and the sandbox will each also exist as their own standalone builds, next to the full game, and the look is moving to a soft rounded palette I am calling Clay Cozy.
What is not finished?
Most of it. The build runs in phases and I stop for a go or no-go at the end of each one, so the multiplayer lobby, the tutorial and the themed rounds are all still ahead. If you want to know how a game like this ends up on the site once it passes, how the arcade works covers the one-folder, one-row process.
Leave a Reply