The Importance of Early Sound Design Integration
In game development sound can play a crucial part in making a player feel immersed and emotionally engaged in an experience. It provides vital cues to guide and lead the player. It delivers tangible feedback to players when they are performing actions within the game. It can reinforce success or failures. It grounds them in your world, within the ups and downs of your narrative. It supports nearly every facet of your game.
There is no doubt that early integration of sound design within the game development process will lead to a more cohesive and polished final product. Bringing on sound design early allows a long term collaboration with the rest of your game’s team. Giving time to prototype, experiment and grow the audio pipeline alongside every other discipline in the development process.
Sometimes sound design in games is treated as a post-production process. Where sound is brought on as one of the last disciplines in the pipeline. This can result in less time for prototyping, iteration and experimentation. As well as less time to catch and fix unintended bugs and performance related issues. Resulting in a situation where audio isn’t as tightly integrated as it could be, and the game is not fully making the most of what sound design can bring to a game experience.
I can’t think of a single instance where bringing on sound design as early as possible wouldn’t result in a better sounding game and more importantly, a better final experience for the players.
Defining the Role of Sound in Your Game
When defining the role of sound in your video game, it is important to define early on sound design’s primary functions within your game. Is it enhancing immersion? Guiding players? Providing feedback? Increasing player’s awareness? Making the player feel powerful? Setting the emotional tone of the experience?
Sound has the ability to do all of these things and more. Defining which areas are most critical for your game early on will help make it easier for your sound team to focus on and plan their approach from the get go.
Is your game light hearted and cartoony in style? Chances are you’d want playful audio that supports and reinforces that aesthetic, with sound design that can delight and ease player’s into the experience.
Is your game a realistic military simulator? Then we’d likely expect gritty and grounded audio, with firearm-accurate sounding weapons. Where each bullet ricochet can help guide players to pinpoint exactly where they are being attacked from, and by which weapon.
Each of these games will have vastly different requirements and goals for their sound design.
Early Prototyping and Sound Experimentation
There are numerous benefits to early prototyping and experimenting when it comes to sound - as there are when prototyping any feature in the game development process. Getting some placeholder sounds up and running within the game as soon as possible can be extremely valuable and a time saver in the long run.
For example, if your game has characters that can walk or run, it is likely that there are also going to be different surfaces that they can walk or run on. Implementing a quick test environment with different ground surfaces set up can allow the sound designer to test this feature and fine tune the implementation of it before it impacts the larger project as a whole. Once this system has been perfected, it can be utilized and scaled for all the characters in the game.
Continuing from the above example, let's say that this game also has enemy NPCs that patrol until alerted by the player. It might be prudent to test the attenuation of the enemies’ footsteps so that the player has clear audio cues about where the NPC is located, even if they can’t see them. Good time to prototype this particular attenuation, but also how attenuations in general are going to be handled in the game.
These are just simple examples, but I hope I’ve got across the idea that prototyping audio in small, controlled stages will allow it to be fine tuned and perfected so that it can be brought over and scaled to the larger project with minimal hiccups.
Sound Design’s Influence on Game Mechanics
Sound design can directly shape and influence gameplay mechanics. For example, audio can help with environment navigation and puzzle problem solving. Some games have specific audio cues that hint at the presence of a hidden object or a clue to a puzzle. Implementing such audio cues in this case would allow the game designers more options when designing puzzles, knowing that they can utilize audio cues in guiding the player to complete a puzzle.
Audio cues can be a powerful way to reinforce some of your game's core mechanics. One of the main mechanics in the Dark Souls series, for example, is the parry. Where if the player times it correctly, they can avoid all of the damage of an attack with a parry. A successful parry is accompanied by a noticeable audible cue to inform the player that they have successfully performed that action. They then can adjust their strategy on the fly, knowing that they have an opening to go on the offensive.
Audio can provide clear status indicators, with sound signals like the sound of a heartbeat and increased breathing to communicate a player's health status being low. Using audio for cues like these means that the player doesn’t have to rely solely on visual cues, freeing up their attention for other aspects of the game.
These are just a few examples where audio can be used to shape and integrate with core gameplay mechanics that will enhance gameplay.
Creating an Audio Style Guide
An audio style guide helps maintain consistency in sound design throughout the game development process. It can provide direction and clarity to the sound design of the game. A style guide can also be an important resource to show a new team member that joins the project further along on its development cycle, helping them get up and running quicker.
A sound style guide could contain things like: sound palette, audio plugin chains, technical delivery specifications and audio references from other media.
Having an audio style guide in place can streamline the sound creation process as well as maintaining a sonic consistency throughout all stages of the game’s development cycle.
Technical Considerations and Early Integration
It’s very important to plan for audio integration within the game development process as early as possible. By asking questions such as: are you going to use your game engine’s default audio system? Are you going to use audio middleware and if so which one? Whichever option you choose, how well will it interface and scale with your game as it grows in scope and complexity?
Knowing the technical needs of the audio in your game will help determine what would be a good fit for your project. If you are making a relatively simple 2d platforming game in Unity, Unity’s default audio system might be more than enough for your audio needs. But if you’re making a large open world game, with lots of complex systems and requiring multiple sound designers, perhaps using audio middleware would be a better solution.
The Long-Term Benefits of Early Sound Design Integration
The advantages of integrating sound design early into the game development process are numerous. The audio team gets to iterate and grow alongside your game’s other systems, resulting in a tight final integration that will benefit gameplay and the final product immensely.
The audio will also have been tailored from the get go to match the emotional, aesthetic and gameplay goals of your game. Making for a more compelling and emotionally impactful experience.
On a technical level, it will also result in there being fewer audio issues and bugs as you get closer to launch. As audio will have had the time it needed in the oven to test, investigate and fix problematic issues earlier in the development cycle.
I would encourage more game developers to view sound design (and audio in general) as a core component of the development process from the outset. Treating it as such will result in a markedly improved final product.
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The Author
This article was written by Oliver Smith. A long-time remote working freelance sound designer dedicated to making gameplay enhancing sound for games.