I'm honestly a bit confused, it seems like it should be such a simple thing, but I'm a bit lost. I read this link which was posted in the sticky... http://www.epicsound.com/sfx/ That seemed to have some good ideas for recording stuff. But what about purely digital sound effects? Take like... 8-bit Mega Man. Is that stuff all done on synths? Run through various effects or something? And what would be the starting sound? I honestly have no clue where to even start.

A majority of those synth-related SFX (like from the 8-bit days) involve using a synth plug-in and manipulating it. For example, I could load up a generic sine patch, capture the sound then apply all kinds of audio FX to it.

Even with "realistic" sound effects, this is commonly the approach. It's considered poor form to take a royalty-free SFX and pop it directly into a game dry. Does it get the job done? Sure! But it doesn't show very much creativity, drive or know-how on the sound designer's part. So most folks take royalty-free collections (or their own home made ones) and combine various sound assets together. Then you add plug-ins and try to make it something that is new and organic. It's also very common for SFX to have both organic and synth elements fused together.

Sound design is actually a highly complex art! What you should try to take a sound sample (or a synth patch) and see how many variations of sounds you can create with that one element. Once you get pretty good at that, try the same exercise with two samples together. Get creative!

With regards to you question about what the starting sound (or source) could be- anything! Of course there are some source files that lend themselves better to certain results. Once I needed an egg cracking SFX for a show trailer I was working on. Believe it or not, but I had NO egg-related SFX. So after searching through my whole library collection I decided to make one. I used some leaves SFX, produced them and was able to make them (combined with some other elements) into a convincing egg cracking SFX.

It can be quite fun when you get into it.

Nate

Where would one find these royalty free collections to start with?