- Mobile Game Design Essentials
- Dr. Claudio Scolastici David Nolte
- 1159字
- 2021-07-23 14:16:07
The sound designer
The sound designer is the person responsible for creating all music and sound effects for a game.
The thing that is most expected from the sound designer is to provide the game with a unique and distinct sound that can make a difference in the player's involvement in the game he's playing.
There is one distinctive factor that makes the job of a game sound designer different from that of his closest relative, the audio designer for movies, which is randomness.
In games, there is never (or should never be) a total control on the exact sequence of events that will be triggered by the player. This is the reason why sound design in games tends to be based on things that may or should happen, rather than what will happen next. As a fact, sound in games is usually broken down into chunks that can then be played as needed.
Though audio is an important feature in games, there are two main reasons to consider the sound designer role less relevant for the purpose of this chapter on the mobile development team.
The first is that the sound designer is rarely a permanent member of the development team working on a game, and audio in games is generally added during the final steps of production. For the most part of development, games are worked on and tested with just audio placeholders. More likely, the audio designer is hired as a contract employee during the last phase of development.
The second is that audio is not as important as other features of a mobile game due to the distinctive kind of fruition of mobile games. As they run on handheld devices, mobile games are likely played outdoors or in crowded locations, such as bus and metro stations. Unless the player wears headphones, the music and sound effects of the game are not very much appreciated. In many cases, the player himself/herself will deactivate sound and sound effects to not bother other people around him/her (or be caught playing by his/her teacher, for example!).
Creating music and sound fx
It is not very easy to make a full list of the tools of a sound designer. Sounds can be produced with many different techniques and tools and their creation requires operations, such as playing musical instruments, recording from a source, mixing, and then editing the sounds with software.
A sound designer works with several tools, such as musical instruments, everyday objects that produce specific sounds, microphones, recording devices, sound libraries, and digital audio workstations.
Sound libraries are an important asset for a sound designer, because they provide already made sound effects that can be mixed together to get original sounds and music. Some of these include the East West Quantum Symphonic Library, Sonic Implants, Garritan, and ProjectSam Symphobia.
The following is a list of basic equipment that a sound designer should have at his/her disposal:
- A multi track digital audio workstation (DAW) for PC and or MAC. There are several such programs and it is impossible to list all of them. We can mention: Garage Band (which is very cheap), Logic Pro, Reaper (which is very cheap) or Sound Forge, Magix, Pro Tools, and Cubase. You can search on the Internet to find out more about the specific features of each of them.
- A two track audio editor, such as Audacity (free license).
- A portable hard disk recorder, if you can afford it.
- Sound libraries of pre-made music and sounds.
- Software to keep libraries organized, such as iTunes.
The following figure represents the working station of a professional sound editor:
Audio skills and tasks
As a freelance audio contractor and the one and only person on the team who knows anything about sound, the sound designer is expected to cover all aspects of sound for games: composing music, creating special effects, mixing, scripting audio events, managing problems of audio formats, and memory allocation issues related to the game audio. The sound designer must be ready to deal with different kinds of problems every day to accomplish his/her task. He/she is also expected to discuss with other team members about any decision that can have an impact on the audio assets he is delivering for the project. As you may understand, this means a lot of responsibility for a single person!
It goes without saying that, the sound designer must be a person with music talents. He/she needs to know how to play at least one musical instrument, how to compose original music, how to record sounds, how to edit them and most importantly, he must be able to convey emotions through music and sounds.
A less obvious, but still very useful skill is that the sound designer must possess some basic programming capabilities, especially the most commonly used APIs.
Scripting proficiency is a very valuable resource too. It can be of help in better understanding the needs of the programmer for specific tasks and help him/her (or the game designer) with the implementation of audio events in the game, should they be overburdened with other tasks.
Though music talents and a strong interest in music are necessary to trigger the career of a sound designer, a background in audio from an accredited college or university is very important to be considered for a position on a project. Music production, sound engineering, recording techniques, post production and editing are the necessary theoretical requirements to be able to work on a game development team and take care of audio.
Then experience comes into play, which is, as usual, the most important thing! Try to get involved in projects, and experiment with tools and musical instruments if you are interested in making audio for games, or find someone who can prove his\her skills with a good portfolio of self made sounds and music for your team.
Audio personality
As with any other creative personality, a good sound designer should possess an attitude for experimenting. Sound editing, in particular, requires a lot of creativity in the way different (and sometimes unexpected!) sounds are mixed together to obtain that specific "door crack" effect you are searching for. A sound designer should never be scared of trying something completely new.
He must also have that special sensibility to help him create sounds and music that convey the right emotions for any specific in-game situation as he must be empathetic with people, in order to use music and sounds to get to their hearts and take control of their emotions.
Being a good communicator is also fundamental to discuss with the game designer and understand his requests about the specific kind of sounds and music he desires for the game. There is an interesting article about the communication between designer and audio expert we suggest you read, from Gamasutra at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/175427/getting_the_most_from_your_sound_php.
If you are interested in finding resources for audio (game) designers, you can begin with the following link: