Most sound effects in an early build come from whichever library had something close. The tile swap is from one pack and the level-complete sting from another, and when a cascade fires five sounds at once they blur into one bright wash.
List the moments in plain words, the way you would for a sound designer: tile swap, match of three, out of moves. Layer designs each sound and plans the pack as a whole, so you skip the library search and the afternoon spent auditioning near misses.
Pitch Tells Players What Happened
Rising, consonant sounds read as a reward and falling ones as a failure, and players hear the difference before they look. In the match-3 pack above, the cascade combo climbs through a run of gem pops while the out-of-moves tone steps down on soft wood. Layer settles the direction of each sound when it plans the pack, since no edit afterwards can turn a falling sound into a rising one.
Invented Creatures, Real Materials
Foley artists have always faked the things nobody can record. Breaking bone is snapped celery, and fire is crinkled cellophane. Layer works the same way, so a crystal golem gets its footstep from grinding stone slabs and its death from a stone fracture, sounds a microphone has heard. For something stranger, give a real sound one property it should not have, like struck glass that rises instead of fading.
Before the Pack Goes In
Clips download as MP3 or WAV. Run the pack through a Workflow to trim the silence ahead of each hit and level every clip in one pass. Normalize the pack as a whole, so no single clip sticks out. See sound effects for more on sound generation in Layer.
For music in the same world, see orchestral game music, adaptive game music and music from your game art.