DEVELOPMENT FEATURES, INTERVIEWS, ESSAYS & MORE
Aural nirvana
As games become more ambitious and look for new ways to immerse players, Craig Chapple analyses the latest tools and techniques open to sound designers
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GAME AUDIO HAS come a long way since the early days of Super Mario, where much of the same music was condensed to provide extra sound effects. Enormous musical scores are now provided on the scale of film, and sound is fast becoming a near central part of all gaming. Take our Develop Awards finalists. Simogo’s text-based adventure title Device 6 heavily relies on its immersive audio to engage the player with the story and ratchet up the tension during key parts of the narrative.
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I can’t for my life understand people that say they play games with the sound turned off. Simon Flesser, Simogo
And the bigger titles like Battlefield 4 and Total War: Rome II rely on realistic sound effects to make the player actually feel like they’re in a warzone, and not just playing a game. “To me sound is as an important factor for feedback as anything visual,” says Simogo founder Simon Flesser.
“I can’t for my life understand people that say they play games with sound turned off. To me, that’d be just as absurd as turning off the screen and playing with sound only.” Another Develop Awards finalist, audio veteran and the man behind Monument Valley’s sounds, Stafford Bawler sums up the importance of such effects by offering an example from a large scale project he’d previously worked on. “I’d just delivered the first proper audio build to the game, replacing all the early tests/ placeholder with first pass final audio that represented where the game was going in terms of audio,” he reminisces. “On hearing this for the first time the game’s lead designer was speaking with the audio coder and said ‘It feels like a proper game now, we’re no longer just making builds’.”
SHARPENING SOUNDS New hardware for both mobile and console, as well as a number of constantly refreshed audio technologies such as FMOD and wwise – which recently opened up new and free indie licences – are also helping studios record and implement new styles of audio. “In previous generations, a limited set of additional tools was available, and it was more restrictive to set up multiple instances
JULY 2014 | 15
Total War: Rome II marked the first time Creative Assembly adopted wwise, offering sound designers a visual GUI to take the workload off the coders
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