Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CHALLENGES OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA
Now that we've laid out a rough timeline of the signii cant events in game audio in the last level, what
are the chief challenges a game audio person must face in designing sounds for this new medium?
Well, the biggest dif erence is that game audio is primarily non-linear in nature. So what does that
mean?
To understand this situation more fully let's consider a linear medium like i lm or television. The key
word for this situation is predictability. In a i lm, if a character goes into the dark spooky castle and
opens the door at 13 minutes and 22 seconds, you can easily create or obtain a sound of a creaking
door and place it on the timeline in your favorite DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) at that exact point.
Once you synchronize it correctly with the i lm itself, it will always play at the same time. In other
words, it's predictable—you know exactly when it will happen.
Now imagine watching this same i lm, only each time you watch it, the character goes into the
house at dif erent times. This is a prime example of the unpredictability and indeterminacy inherent in
games. How could you successfully create sounds for a medium in which you don't know when in
time a particular action is going to happen? How can you create a way to trigger them reliably?
The answer in this case, is that largely, you need to throw away using time as a basis for organizing these
sounds and concentrate on the actions in the movie itself. Let's think of our spooky house situation from
the angle of the action involved. So at some point, the character is going to come up to the house and
open the door. It doesn't matter when. So let's list it as an action like this:
Action #001 Spooky Door Opening
➔
Play ' spookydoor.wav '
Now we've dei ned our action—but how do we trigger it? In a movie, we may be out of luck, but
fortunately in the game there's already something that's going to cause the door to move. Most likely
this will be some kind of animation code. So we then hook up the code that triggers the animation of the
door with the sound of a creaky door and voila! Instant sync—whenever the character opens the door
the sound will play.
However, this shift in thinking requires that each sound in the game exists as a separate item. We mostly
can't use a mix of the sound ef ects and music anymore, except in certain situations. Everything has to be
independently mixed and mastered separately. Furthermore, we have to be really organized with all of
these audio i les (for huge AAA adventure games there can be hundreds of thousands of i les!) so that the
programmer knows what to do with these assets in the game.
It also means that how the audio is triggered in a game is intimately tied up with how the game is
designed, and each game is a complete universe unto itself. It's got its own sets of rules and regulations
and rules for emergent behavior and interactivity, and any change in terms of game design can
signii cantly af ect how the sounds are triggered.
