Designing Awesome Videogame Audio

Step 3 Audiosplosion!

So, when making a game, you need a handful of skills. Maybe you've got all the skills to do it yourself, maybe they're distributed among a couple different people. You need to be able to design the game, write the code, create the art (often including animation), and create memorable audio. We had all these skills except the last one.

A lot of times, when you've got a small company, you do what you can with the resources available to you. When we started, I'd made a lot of the placeholder art. You can see that in the image below. It wasn't pretty, but it was enough to differentiate between surface types where necessary, and make sure the game functioned properly. Once we had a dedicated artist? The next picture shows what kind of difference that makes.

Now, I'm a competent musician - I can play a handful of instruments, and have even written a couple pieces of music. But that was long ago, and the difference between someone who's competent and someone who's excellent is vast.

Fortunately, we knew of a guy who had experience with music who *was* excellent. Wes Carroll's been a beatboxer for years. We'd known him prior to starting the project, and as a talented guy with audio experience, we knew that for Taxiball, we wanted to use his particular skills.

Now, if you listen to Taxiball's final soundtrack, you may think, "Of course - it's obvious that if they knew a beatboxer, this is the soundtrack that would result! It's just full of beatboxing!" But things aren't always as straightforward as they may seem.