Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
characters and universes like Scooby Doo or Star Wars. If you are going to record character
dialogue using actors’ voices, your in-game character dialogue better be ready
and tested. You might only get one chance to get the dialogue you need, and you might
have 30 minutes to do it.
Pushing Game Audio Further
We all probably have a pretty good idea how audio is used commonly in games. New
standards and technologies are pushing game audio further. Game publishers really
only start supporting features and functionality after they are present in a large number
of players’ homes. These days, some game audio is Dolby-encoded for expanded stereo
and surround-sound setups, but the enthusiasts who have such setups constitute a
small subset of the general gaming audience. Hence, it’s hard to make the argument to
a game publisher that this kind of support is necessary or is a competitive advantage.
Huge areas of game audio possibility remain commercially unexplored. Putting a
cricket sound in a scene is one thing, but attaching a sound to a missile ripping by the
player’s head that creates real positional audio feedback for the player is an exciting
and almost entirely untapped area of game sound development.
Doppler shift, the rise in pitch frequency as an audio source approaches and its immediate
lowering in frequency as soon as it passes (think of an ambulance whizzing
by you), can be modeled in game scenes. Quite honestly, though, construction tools
are only starting to get this sophisticated. SoundMAX (www.audioforgames.com) is
trying to change this scenario. Plus, many of the most interesting audio phenomena
would require the player to use headphones. Many players simply don’t wear them
when playing.
Many environmental designers are excited by the possibilities for positional audio,
and are just starting to explore these avenues. Implementing innovative audio
and using audio in games in new ways becomes, yet again, primarily a software tools
issue. It is a content-innovation issue. Game programmers routinely have plenty to
deal with in coding and expanding state-of-the-art game engines and toolsets. Only
fairly recently have the tools become powerful enough to allow developers who are
focused on game content alone to be able to experiment to a greater degree than was
previously possible.
D ESIGN TOOLS SHIFT
Developing lighting, texturing, particles, and audio for games means more than cre
ating these particular assets in commercial 3-D packages. It isn’t just a matter of writing