Games and Sound

Games and Sound

Sound Design

Think about that for a minute. SOUND, DESIGN. Yes ? you can design sound. Yes, you can make a library sound better. And YES you can randomly generate sound in a planned, guided way. This is what makes a game sound fresh. This is what takes the repetitious nature out of a game. Why should we here gunshot_01.aiff seven thousand times before we finally find, and kill Hitler? Be brave, layer a few waveforms.

Implementation

This is a little harder to accomplish, especially for the Indie team. Good implementation means a strong relationship between the coding team(s) and the audio department. It's hard to convince the programmers to even consider weaving a sound trick into the engines sleeve, when they don't even have a box floating around in wireframe-land. In this area, a little goes a long way. Whether it be adaptive music, or randomized effects etc ? making the game do more with your awesome sound makes a huge difference for the gamer experience as a whole. If you are using middleware like Wwise, or FMOD ? these utilities have lots of little implementation tools that you can use to make the sound better, so do it ? don't be happy for the game just to trigger an effect, and if it plays ? great. Use invisible actors, use automated effects. Squeeze as much processing out of the audio engine as possible. It will pay off.

The Mixer

The mixer is pretty damn important. All games have one ? this how we hear panning, changes in amplitude and changes in reverb etc. The mixer is responsible for dynamically adjusting the levels for hundreds of sounds at a time. Sometimes, the mixer also is in charge of coordinating the effects in a game ? reverb, modulation, automated EQ's, distortion. Most importantly, the Audio Mixer is responsible for assigning the aural focus of the game. What does the player hear, and at what time / for how long. If the mixer does a crap job, it really blows great implementation, and great design to hell. Personally, I would rather take a simple, basic mixer then a huge advanced mixer that chokes up every time it needs to jump into action.

The reality is ? even if you have no control over an interactive mix, or what level or quality of implementation you can provide ? a game will sound great even if just the Sound Design aspect is in place. A colleague of mine once said, "None of what we do here is real, but it damn well better sound like it".

So for any of you committed to interactive audio, or maybe just curious about how to approach game sound, keep your eyes on this site. As time permits, I will be offering tutorials on sound design, small objective tutorials in Wwise, and Fmod ? I am even into taking requests for certain game engines. If you are working in an engine and trying to figure out how to push the audio engine a little further ? drop me a line, I am sure others are thinking the same thing.

I will also be doing a few tutorials or articles on Max/Msp, as it relates to interactive audio and how it plays a big role in prototyping ? Cycling74 has provided us with a great way of presenting a road map to the programmers; now they can think like a sound guy. Thanks Mr. Puckett!

It is also worth noting that while I work exclusively in Digi-Design ProTools ? PT is not required for any of the work ahead. A surprisingly large number of game audio professionals I have met actually prefer software like Soundforge, Wavelab and Peak/Deck, one guy swore by Audacity ? the free, open source (I think) audio editor. Confidentiality states I can't name names, but certain designers/studios are using experimental DAW's like Reaper because that's what they are comfortable with, and that's all that matters. Unfortunately the trade off is that I am comfortable with Pro Tools, which is where my references will come from. Most people will find that any function I talk about is available on any platform; you just might have to do it the hard way, or the long way.