When people think about audio in games they typically think about how it makes them feel
Often, they think of a game soundtrack
Or maybe how an audio cue makes them excited when they get a killstreak or complete a level
But many people don't realize that one of audios great all-encompassing purposes in a game
Is to actually be informative
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Before we begin, please say hi to Ryan from blipsounds.com
Who guest wrote this episode. Thanks Ryan!
One of the greatest challenges for a game designer
Is in making sure the player gets all the information they need
Not only tutorial stuff
But information like where bullets are coming from
Or when they're getting hit
And the more efficiently a game designer can transfer this stuff to your brain
The more they're able to put in their game without overloading the player
So one of the great quests in game design is to deliver information more and more efficiently
And any good game designer knows one place you can do that is through sound
Audio is an excellent way to provide information to a player
But it has to be done well
Because audio can be very misleading if it's done poorly
Take a game like Super Mario Brothers
When you get damaged, you'll become small Mario and hear a sound like this
[ Super Mario Bros power down sound ]
And when you collect a mushroom, you'll hear a sound when you become big Mario like this
[ Super Mario Bros power up sound ]
But what if Nintendo got really lazy and decided to use the same sound for both?
Rather than convey information?
This would just serve to confuse the player
Because now on a really busy screen when the player hears that sound
They'll have to check
Huh? did I just get hit or did I just accidentally get a mushroom?
And while actually counterproductive sound design like this is rare
You know what's common?
Cluttered audio
Let's take counter-strike as an example
When playing counter-strike you see what's directly in front of you
Which covers a 90 degree spectrum
But there's an entire other 270 degrees that isn't being accounted for in your vision
So thankfully we have the audio at our disposal to give us the information about what we can't see
But in a really high-intensity moment in counter-strike
There can actually be too much audio
And while this sort of mimics a real fire fight
With people screaming in your ears grenades going off the sounds of shots being fired
And others impacting things
This can also be a little like having a really cluttered UI
You might miss that telltale sound of the bomb being planted because of everything else going on
But this of course also creates interesting strategies
And the option for a team to go and create a distraction
While one of their other members does something sneaky
But it has to be used very carefully
Because like a cluttered UI, a cluttered audio scape tells the player nothing
That's not to say that audio can't be complex either
Audio is incredibly dynamic
Because while it doesn't have a nice 4k screen to display itself on
What it does have is a set of speakers, volume, panning and 20,000 Hertz of human hearing range
And while this can get cluttered very quickly, if we look at a game like Overwatch
The design group and the audio team have worked together
To expertly craft its audio to be dynamically informational
In an overwatch team fight we can have up to 12 players
making footstep sounds, voice lines, weapon sounds, secondary weapon sounds, and their ultimate sounds
And then on top of that we also have 11 players fighting in front of us from a first-person perspective
That is a lot of clutter
And it's a lot of information being given to the player at once
So how does overwatch make this gigantic team fight
Into something that can clearly inform the player about what is happening?
It all comes down to how the audio is mixed
Overwatch will prioritize the most important sounds in a team fight
By making the volume louder than the less important ones
So which sounds are more important? The ones that are the most dangerous to the listening player
For instance, You'll always hear your enemy team's footsteps over your own team's footsteps
You'll always hear something as dangerous as widowmaker's sniper rifle at full power
Over Lucio's sonic amplifier
You'll always hear an enemy team's ultimate over everything else in the game
Die! Die! Die!
And you'll always hear more dangerous Ultimates over less dangerous ones
If you could please stop living, that would be nice
And it's because these things dictate the flow of the long-term game at hand
And when all this informational audio is combined with
Memorable characters, distinctive animations, and clear VFX
It allows players to process a huge amount of information in almost any teamfight
So when you're designing the sound in a game
Ask yourself
What does the player need to know? And how can you convey that with sound?
Then ask yourself, are you making your sounds distinct enough from one another
And finally if it seems like you have too much going on in your game altogether
Can the audio be reorganized to be clearer and more informative?
Because if it can't then it might be time to scale back a bit
if you can do all that
Then a player will be able to pick up the most important information in your game with ease
[zoey meows]
[zoey grows]
See, I get that!
[deep growl]
Good... giant... Zoey. Oh, no. No. NO, I DON'T WANNA PLAY!!
Once again, thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode
Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes
And design business technology and more
In fact after completing this episode I dove back into skill shares treasure trove of instructional videos
Where I learned about sound mixing digital illustration and attention management
Um, what was I... what was I doing again?
Haha!!! Just kidding. That doesn't happen anymore
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