Oh okay, that makes sense. It is possible that the reason the dust effect didn't quite work is because everything else was little quiet in the mix. Like, if you had something heftier on the low end of the jump, and the dust be a little more quiet and more on the high end, it would balance it out? I don't know, just spitballing. Also, may I suggest playing around with more of a grinding sound, maybe? Like, two large stones grinding against one another. I don't know if it'll work, but if I was supposed to create a sound effect of a stone character jumping, that'd be my first instinct, so it might be worth a try.
The bass I used for the intro was in a synth pack called Hybrid. https://www.airmusictech.com/product/hybrid-3 It's quite pricy, but I was lucky enough that my MIDI keyboard came with a download code for it. (My midi keyboard didn't even cost as much as this synth pack, hahaha). The funny thing is, the bass sound I used for the intro was actually supposed to have a voice-like quality, you know, a Living on a Prayer, wah-wah type thing, but I found the whole track to be a bit too bassy, so when I removed a bit of the low end in mastering, that voice quality totally disappeared. Except at the end of the loop, where you can hear it quite well. I found that a bit weird. But I'm still happy with how it sounds.
Yeah, I'll probably expand the main loop track to be longer. I wasn't really sure how long my levels were going to be and whether the track would restart or not, and plus, you know, making all the assets during the jam, I didn't have too much time to spend on the music. It took me about an hour to create both tracks, and I didn't want to spend longer than that, so I consciously kept the loops short. And actually, I wasn't really going for anxiety. I was going more for strategy and survival, rather than panic, but yeah, it's interesting, I found that as soon as people realize that they can't shoot their gun willy nilly, the flight instinct kicks in, and they just start running around frantically. I hadn't foreseen that. I do want to build on this game, but at this point, I'm not sure if I want to just roll with the more frantic pacing, or restructure it so that it'd be more intuitive for people to be more tactical about it.
As for the sound effect, yeah, I'm a bit conflicted about that. You're right, most people don't realize that pushing crates drains their stamina, but I really don't want to end up with something that ends up getting annoying because of how often the player hears it. Maybe I'll try for a visual queue first, and see if it's enough.
Thank you so much for your feedback! It's fun to talk music with someone. Like I said, I've only started composing recently, so it's been really fun and challenging getting into it, and it's nice to talk shop with another game composer.