Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME . . .
Technology has been on a path of miniaturization since the 1960s, when the transistor took over
the vacuum tube, and the 1970s, when the integrated circuit miniaturized the transistor. Since then,
we have been on an upward trajectory of speed and a downward trajectory of size. A decade into
the new millennium, you could buy a phone with more CPU power, greater graphic power, and
a lower price tag than the fastest computer made in the 1990s, and this trend has only increased
since then.
In combination with the increase in technological sophistication, the online world that blossomed
with the advent of the World Wide Web has matured as well. Companies are fully invested in Web 2.0
technology, fueled increasingly by open source approaches. Browsing on a smartphone looks almost
exactly like browsing on a desktop, except for the size of the screen. E-commerce is a given. Digital
distribution not only of music, but also topics, movies, television shows, and, yes, games, is a regular part
of everyday life. In an instant, someone on a computer, phone, or tablet can download nearly any kind
of digital entertainment. Now that access to mobile and casual web-based games is nearly universal, the
market is expanding at a tremendous rate.
From the standpoint of a seasoned game composer or sound designer, however, the experience of
creating assets for these new mobile and web-based mediums is a case of Dejà vu. Let's take a game
franchise like Sega's
Sonic the Hedgehog
. It i rst debuted in 1991 for the Sega Genesis, which featured
a maximum of 8KB of dedicated audio playback RAM (that's 1/128th of 1MB!), reading from a cartridge
that could store a maximum of 4MB for everything in the entire game. No digital audio playback
was possible—you had to use the onboard FM chips (six voices) and sound generators (three square
waves and one noise channel) in conjunction with MIDI for all music and sound ef ects. Can you say
limitations?
Sonic games created for later hardware increased the number of voices available, adding the ability
to play digital audio samples as well as FM synthesis. CD-ROM gave way to DVD-ROM, and by the time
2010's
Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode 1
was released for multiple platforms (Xbox 360 and PS3), the
channel counts and quality were so high that the hardware was no longer the limiting factor anymore.
At almost the same time the console version was released, SEGA also released an iOS version. Now, If you
were hired to create sound for this version of the game, you would all of a sudden come face-to-face with
hardware limitations again. This means 32 simultaneous software sound channels, plus considerably less
RAM and application space to store audio assets. The iOS version does not roll the clock back to 1988, but
the hardware limitations lie somewhere in the range of the late 1990s. The Xbox 360 version of this game
by contrast has over 256 software audio channels available!
This is not a brand new phenomenon—over the years, there's been a
lot of back and forth between high-end and low-end systems, all at the
same time. Nintendo's Game Boy (see sidebar) broke open a huge market
of rabid game fans willing to sacrii ce performance for portability, and
