Chapter 19: Creating and Programming Sound

Overview

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, audio artists compose the music and sound in a game. Good designers work with creative and inspired audio artists to create musical compositions that intensify the game experience.

It also bears repeating that audio artists work closely with the game designers determining where the sound effects are needed and what the character of the sounds should be. They often spend quite a bit of time experimenting with sound-effect sources, looking for different ways to generate the precise sound needed. Visit an audio artist at work and you might catch him slapping rulers and dropping boxes in front of a microphone. After capturing the basic sound, an audio artist will then massage the sound with sound-editing tools, varying the pitch, speeding up the sound or slowing it down, removing unwanted noise, and so on. It's often a tightrope walk balancing realistic sounds with the need sometimes to exaggerate certain characteristics in order to make the right point in the game context.

When creating your game, you have a choice between two basic approaches: obtain a good source of sound effects and music (like an audio library) or create your own sounds. Of course, you also have the option to combine the two approaches. Audio libraries are available from a wide variety of sources, and the commercial ones are quite thorough and professionally made. There are audio libraries available via the Internet for free, but the quality of these sources varies widely in breadth, depth, and recording fidelity.

In this book we are going to take the do-it-yourself approach. The main advantage of going this way is the price; a secondary advantage is that you have total control over the contents of your sound files.