Designing Awesome Videogame Audio

Step 10 So... that's it?

For the most part, yeah - that's it. In the end, the all-vocal beatbox soundtrack has been a feature that Taxiball players have really enjoyed so far, and lends the game a distinctive flavor. You can still play iPod tracks over it if you want, but the fact that the sound's always changing, and that it reacts to your input into the game, keeps the beatbox audio track a vital and tightly integrated part of the game.

All the sound effects were also done vocally - and are a lot more "literal" than the music track, simply because the information they need to convey *needs* to have a 1:1 relationship with your action on screen. Bump a wall? Hear a bump. Drop into water? Hear a "sploosh." Because they were all made by the same mouth, they had a level of consistency that was really neat, and lent the game's audio a distinctive and very memorable character.

We learned a lot about developing sound for an iPhone game while making Taxiball - we had to deal with the vast difference between the speaker and headphones, ways to cover up otherwise inelegant transitions in the audio, how to separate sounds so that each part of the audio spectrum conveys a different meaning, and what kinds of ways we can have audio react to player input.

I hope this has shone some light on what kinds of thinking go into creating audio for a videogame. In the end, the dynamic beatbox soundtrack's been one of the things that players have responded really positively to, and one of the things that makes Taxiball a unique experience.

Thanks for reading!