Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
For example, the listening conditions for a mobile game are hardly comparable to
that of a title you can play on a home console or PC. The spatial sound available
for house speakers, as well as the difference between left and right channels, may
not be available on a mobile phone when playing on a bus or in the doctor's waiting
room. As we said, headphones could help here, but you cannot rely on players using
them.
Then there's noise! When playing outdoors, all kinds of noise can interfere with your
game sounds: background sounds, other people's conversations, dogs barking, and
the like, which will negatively affect your game audio, if not masking it at all. Testing
your game audio in different environments and with or without headphones, is crucial
to find the optimal setting and tuning for your game audio.
Another aspect to be taken into account is the social aspect of playing in public.
People around our player shouldn't be bothered with audio coming from his mobile
phone or the player may not want people to know what he is doing. Those facts imply
several decisions to be taken at a design level, for example, setting the ideal volume
game sounds should be played at or the conditions at which audio starts and stops
playing.
As you can see, sound design for mobile games should not be seen as a task inde-
pendent from the more general design of a game as a whole!
