This week our guest was a specialist in sound design by the name of Jessica Saunders, she is a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit and Director of her very own games studio Salix Games. She also worked on Batman: Arkham Knight, creating sounds for the game’s UI and designing many other in the game. Her lecture will teach us about many different types of sounds specific to game design, and more specifically how to tackle them as a Sound Designer
Before going into much detail, Jessica taught us about seven different categories of sound that we hear in every game that we play:
She then began to go into detail about each category of sound design, answering several questions about each:
Task 11 – Sound Design brainstorm
Jessica then gave us a prompt to brainstorm about in groups, she gave us a situation and tasked us with creating a “Things to consider” as she had been providing us with for the other types of sound design so far.
The following is what I had thought about when considering “Sound Designing” this specific scenario.
- Where? – Where is this confrontation taking place?
- Scale? – How close are you to the creature? How big is the creature?
- How? – How does it breathe? How does it work?
- What? – What is its biology? What type of animal is it/based off of?
- Context? – Are you hunting the creature? Is it hostile to you?
This lecture taught me so many things about sound design in video games that I had no idea even existed, it gave me a new perspective on what I hear when playing games and will help me when coming up with the sound portion of my GDD.
“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know”
~ Aristotle
