Game Sound Design

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After learning how to record sounds with Foley techniques while making a sound design for an animated alien video, game audio was a great area to apply my new skills. Using various recordings I made with a zoom recorder, I build up a sound library to fill some of the sounds in the Cube Game as adapted by Wwise for their Wwise fundamentals course.

This was a really great way to introduce myself to the Wwise software and take my sound design techniques to the next level. I worked hard to layer different sounds together to make four different kinds of footstep sounds, each with three variations. I also used the Xpand!2 virtual instrument to produce some of the sound effects used.

I found capturing the audio and building my sounds relatively straightforward. Although getting to grips with the Wwise sound engine was a steep learning curve.

As can be seen in my Youtube video example, I managed to implement multiple sounds in different aspects of gameplay.

In essence this is done by adding a sound (WAV file) to a sound object in the Wwise enging. This sound object can then be linked to events in the game using something called an event. Events link sound objects to markers in the code that correspond to specific gameplay conditions. An example might be the heart beat sound which comes on when the player is low on health. The event links this information about the health being low with the heartbeat sound so that the sound only plays at the right time.

Game syncs keep track of things like player health and whether or not the player is alive. These syncs feed into the events and the sounds triggering the right sounds at the right time. Each of these objects and the different methods in Wwise allow sound designers to focus mainly on the sound without having to worry about the programming. Having said this, programming is an important aspect of this work where the sound events can only occur when they are propperly matched up with the right gameplay events, which relies on the programmers leaving appropriate markers which the Wwise enging can use to determine what is happening in the game and when certain sound might need to be played.

Although learning how to use Wwise was a new experience for me, I have been encouraged to keep learning and hope to develope sound designs for other games in the future.

In terms of the audio I used Sound effects, Foley, Ambience, Dialogue and Music to fill in some of the games audio requirements.

As can be heard in the Youtube video, there is theme music that blends with ambience which I made. This continues to loop throughout gameplay. Some of the other sounds like the “Ice blast” require you to use the ice crystal weapon in order for them to be heard.

There is a lot more I would like to do with a project like this and this learning opportunity has opened a lot of doors.