AUDIO SPECIAL // SOUND IN GAMES | BETA
for developers, and suggested stating the requirement early on if it’s central to the experience. He also says designers need to make sure audio can run on older devices, which can limit effects on newew mobiles despite their more advanced capabilities. “For some reason or another, people tend to play mobile games without sound, and quite a few puzzles in Device 6 requires the player to listen to audial clues,” he says. “We used low pass filters here and there, and we actually had to turn that off on older devices because it was too demanding and we want to keep a steady framerate and performance to keep the experience smooth.”
IN THE FIELD
While many games keep to a small size, it could be argued many more are becoming bigger and more ambitious, particularly at the top end. As such, the use of field-recording is becoming more widely used and new libraries are being created as the old sounds from past games become overused.
Recording your own material or
investing in boutique libraries constructed for games is a must.
Stafford Bawler, sound designer
communicate different materials, the right amount of reverb on sounds to communicate size of rooms, mixing things properly, fiddling a lot with EQ on every sound to make everything feel just right within the space that the player was in at the moment.”
AUDIO CONSTRAINTS
Time and budget constraints can of course play a big role in the quality of audio and its variety, particularly if designers are required to go to the source, but mobile in particular throws up a unique set of challenges. The major limitations presented by smartphones, Bawler says, is the speakers themselves, which often use mono and face away from the listener or are placed just under the player’s hands.
“The Nintendo 3DS has amazing HRTF playback going on with its speakers. It would be awesome if more phones featured this kind of thing,” he states.
“You also have to deal with the fact games on mobile are played all over the place, often crowded or noisy environments, or places where you don’t want to annoy other people. When I was traveling on the tube in London whilst working on Monument Valley, there were about ten people in the carriage all playing their phones. On the one hand I thought it was a shame they were all silent, but I was also thankful that we didn’t have an amusement arcade cacophony going on.” Flesser adds that getting people to play mobile games with the sound turned on is actually one of the biggest challenges
JULY 2014 | 17
Bawler suggests sound designers now need to up their game if they’re to create the soundscapes consumers clamour for. “Going out and recording your own material or investing in boutique libraries specially constructed for games is a must,” he states. “The older libraries have been our bread and butter for years, but they were all recorded for TV, film, radio etcetera – a linear environment where you’re making a ‘photograph’ of sound rather than the dynamic, living, breathing soundscapes we have to create for games.” Beddow says the audio process isn’t necessarily becoming significantly more difficult as games get bigger, but says such scale has sparked a greater management challenge of the process.
“You have to be smart,” he says. “Largely it’s about the best way to manage the asset-volume and deploy the right resources,
VIRTUAL HEARING
ONE TECHNIQUE BEING championed for virtual reality gaming is binaural audio. The effect simulates the way people hear, allowing them to determine the location of sounds in the environment to their near precise place in the game.
One firm, Scotland-based Two Big Ears, has developed a real-time binaural engine called 3Dception,
a Unity plug-in that can currently be used for Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS, with support for other development environments also on the way. Co-founder and director Varun Nair (pictured) says the technique can be used to create a believable experience, by taking in factors such as how the brain interprets the location of sound. “Virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus, with head and positional tracking, are fantastic at creating believable and immersive visual worlds,” he says. “The difference between stereo audio and binaural audio is just as different as playing a game on a computer screen and through a pair of VR goggles. The VR experience puts you at the centre of action and binaural audio helps strengthen that belief. Traditional stereo sound comparatively sounds a bit flat. If I see something flying over me, I’d like to hear it fly over me too. Most VR experiences are personal and binaural audio is a perfect fit.”
both internal and external, to deliver the kind of deeply immersive, cinema-grade soundscape that the modern player, quite rightly, has come to expect.”
Looking forward, many more techniques, both old and new, could become more central to the audio process, such as binaural audio in virtual reality games [See boxout Virtual hearing], for example.
Bawler says he’s excited by the prospect of working with procedural audio in future, particularly given the prominence of various uses of the procedural generation technique evident in the industry at the moment [See page 40 for more details].
“Since very early days, my way of working has been built upon building complex sounds and audio systems from simple components combined in interesting ways,” says Bawler. “Procedural audio seems like a natural fit for this way of working, and from what I can tell, you still need a sound designer to make sure it’s all sounding as it should.”
One of the challenges of mobile audio (below left), is the need to support older models, meaning developers may have to forgo the latest advancements in tech
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