Game Audio Notes

Asset Creation

• Recording
• Designing 
• Sourcing

Implementation 

• Triggers
• Events (how the sound works)
• Optimization 

Both sides crossover in pipelines

All games have different sets of pipelines

Ambience – ambient sounds (every room has a sound)

• The starting point, indicates what the area is like just from walking into it.
• Point sources: giving the sound a point of origin, affects how loud it is depending on your proximity to the source.
• Little reverb in ambience, although depends on the game. 
• Occlusion: stops certain noises, for instance you won’t hear another room when the door is closed.

When making ambience you should think of the location and time. For instance a dock at night would have a lot of wind and waves but little to no chatter. 

Think of specific indicators of what would distinguish places. For instance in a dock you’d hear the water splash against the boats, versus by the coast where the water would just splash on the sand.

Walla – crowd sounds (muttering, coughing, etc.)

• Should indicate the area (think of language and location)
• Should react to spaces (for instance dispersing a crowd)
• Consider number of people 
• 5+ rule (if more than 5 people are in a room you may need walla)
• Treated like ambience 

Foley – real world sounds (footsteps, typing, opening doors)

• Adds depth and realism 
• Grounds the character and player into the world (for instance punch sounds or footsteps)
• Requires thought and study of movement (make it sound as natural as possible so the player doesn’t constantly hear the same noises over and over)
• 7 is the magic number (7 variants of each foot step)

A lot of foley is driven by animation

Sound Design – fiction world sounds (sounds that are difficult to record and must be created in house generally)

• Anything unreal, can be hard to quantify 
• Guns, explosions, and physics usually fall under this category 
• Creatures, particles, “subjectives” 
• Can cross over with music and foley
• Job title (sound designer)

UI – sounds that indicate things to the players (doesn’t exist in the world, for instance maps and menu buttons)

• Has to cut through the rest of the soundscape
• Sole purpose is to relay information to the player 
• Avoid repetition for multi-sounds (for instance collectibles constantly having the same sound)
• A cohesive suite so the player knows what is happening even subconsciously 
• Make sure it fits the world and game 

Dialogue – voice acting

• Writing team will write the script then may come to the sound designer to record
• Dialogue requires a lot of editing
• Sound designer job is usually to just implement the dialogue into the game

Music – music (not much to expound on)

• Sound designers job in regards to music is implementation of the music
• Lots of dealing with pipelines 
• Composer may not understand video games so things such as loops and loop cuts may be difficult 
• Very difficult to be a composer and sound designer you usually pick one or the other