Sound Design In

Games

Sound design

An audio environment is an environment that is de-signed to sound realistic. It is a mixture of sounds that together makes the ambience of the environ-ment. These sounds can be produced as visuals; these are called waveforms. Waveforms are the graphical form of sound waves. Different sounds have different waves, see picture right.

Attack is the beginning of the sound. The more attack, the louder the be-ginning of the sound is. Sustain is the length of the last sound. The more sustain the sound has the longer the notes it will last. But the sound will fade away for longer, de-pending on how much sustain there is.Gain increases all values to increase the amplitude. This can cause a dis-torted sound.

A sound production source is Foley sound production. Foley sound is where the sounds are produced in a studio, and made to sound like the real thing by using other objects to make the sounds that we think we should hear.

Diegetic sound is a type of audio. It is the sound that is produced, that can be seen by the player. Where as non-diegetic is the opposite. It is from a source that can’t be seen by the player. For example, a narrator.

One of the most popular types of sound format is the .wav file type. This is a condensed file form that is in small file sizes. .aiff is an apple version of a lossless file type. However, this can take up a lot more space than other file types. A simple file format is .au, it is only 8-bit. This can be very restrictive, but useful if 8-bit is only needed..smp is an audio file type for mac and windows. Smartmusic is the biggest user if this file type but changed to .smpx. .voc is also usually associated with audio files. But this was different with the ZX Spectrum. It used .voc files as image files that could be created with the ZX Spectrum software.

Lossy compression, is a type of file compression that looses a lot of the data that was originally in an image. This can be beneficial if the file space is limited, but won’t be as good as the original.

Sound design in a game of my choice

Portal 2 has fantastic sound design. The soundtrack is dynamic and changes with different chambers that have different sound effects that make you feel like you are in a massive test chamber.

The soundtrack it’s self is made from pro-fessionally made scores, but also some were procedurally generated with a com-puter.

Both the games in this series have a personalised song at the end of the game that represents the story of the game. This is voiced by the main

character in her normal sarcas-tic computer enhanced tone.

If you look hard enough there are Easter eggs throughout the games. Some of these include a turret songs that have the turrets sing using parts to make a song.

From walking on different surfaces to a robot’s death in a pool of toxic water, it needed a sound effect. The most common method of creating foot steps and other common sound effects is the use of a Foley artist. However this can’t always be the case. Some sound effects that were used in portal 2 were computer generated to get that futuristic feeling.