Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 3
Audio for games is usually done by a small in-house audio staff at a game developer
or by independent contractors set up to provide game audio. The level or mission
descriptions in your design document, described in Chapter 2, should specify
your audio requirements and intentions. Your development team needs to ask itself
the following question: How are we going to use audio to support gameplay? The answers
to this question range from the obvious to the not so obvious.
Typically, audio is used in games in one of two ways: music is “streamed” or
played off the CD or hard drive to accompany a scene, or audio effects or music segments
are loaded into your hardware RAM. The gaming consoles and PC sound
cards have processors dedicated to handling audio processing. This fact has allowed
game developers to do more than ever before. Audio-specific processors and RAM
have helped open up the field.
In general, audio events that must happen rapidly or in real time, such as kicks,
punches, gunshots, and gear shifts, are loaded into audio RAM for immediate playback
upon button or key input from a game controller or PC keyboard. Audio that accompanies
cinematics or segues might simply play off of the CD or hard drive.
From a design standpoint, pay attention to when and how audio is used in your favorite
games. How much or how little of which types are used? Huge crunchy gunshots
and hollowed-out beam-weapon sounds definitely support gameplay, but
don’t forget about ambience! A character’s footstep sound alone is not ambience.
Some “greater” audio cue should always be setting the tone and prickling the scene.
Maybe something is breathing. Maybe you hear distant chimes. Footsteps aren’t
enough. Ambient audio should close you in and give you a sense of perspective and
immersion. As a goal or ideal, aim for multilayer audio at all times. Personally, I
always try to find new ways to keep the player on edge by using audio, or to deliver a
new audio experience.
For a baseball game I was working on, I thought it would be interesting to localize
the audio to players on the field. In other words, I wanted to simulate baseball game
audio with a sense for position on the field. Playing in a major league baseball game
“sounds” different if you’re a catcher versus a center fielder. This particular game allowed
players to play specific field positions (for example, catcher or infielder) and to
“grow character attributes” for each position on a baseball team. I wanted the audio
to reflect this idea.
The field of game audio has plenty of room to grow. It hasn’t become very dimensional
yet, partly because developers have assumed that players’ speaker systems (for
all but the diehards) are marginal at best.
If you know that several weapons’ sounds will be playing over your ambience or
your music soundtrack, you should try to fill the audio spectrum from low bass sounds
to higher frequency sounds. For a variety of reasons, this isn’t always accounted for.
Design planning also plays a crucial role in implementing audio. These days, many
licensed games are in production. Licensed games are those based on well-known
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Lighting, Texturing, Particles, Effects, and Audio