Designing Awesome Videogame Audio

Step 4 Thinking In the Box

So, a game needs sound. Not only does sound communicate information (a collision into a wall, or a celebratory cheer), but it adds a richness to the experience nothing else can. An sound designer at my last job claimed that sound accounted for 40% of the experience of a game. I don't know how he'd measure that, but in practice, it feels accurate.

The way we'd been thinking about the sound was pretty straightforward. We'd need the traditional "informative" sounds:

• Collision with a wall
• "Rolling" sound on multiple surface types (ice, asphalt, grass)
• "Plonk" sound for falling into water
• Fare successfully completed
• Fare failed
• Music
• etc.

"Music" in this case meant a soundtrack to each level - given that a player was going to spend anywhere from a minute to 10 minutes on a level, the music had to be interesting enough to not get annoyingly repetitive in that time. Given the seven levels we'd planned for the game, that was a lot of sound.

The idea was to have Wes, who had a nice microphone and the appropriate sound processing software, do some mix of vocal noises that would add character to the game, and create the more basic sounds, like a ball rolling, using real-world stuff.

Here, you can hear a "rolling" sound - made simply by rolling a marble on a wood surface. It's functional, appropriate, and totally boring.