Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Peter Drescher is a
sound designer and
programmer and has
a lot of experience
working on games
in the mobile space.
Here is his take on
what it takes to create
great sound for all
things small.
“
I like to say that the
only
thing that matters is how it sounds on the
device. You can create the Greatest Explosion Sound Ever™ for your
game, but when played on a tiny underpowered cell phone speaker, it
might sound like a mouse fart. You can write the coolest grooving music
track with a fat bassline and a booming kick drum, but when played on
an iPhone speaker, all you'll hear is the snare and the melody.
One of my favorite Duke Ellington quotes is
'
You've got to write for
your players', and that's true whether you're composing for Johnny
Hodges or the Vienna Symphonic Library. For mobile gaming, your
player is a speaker the size of your thumbnail (if you've got small
hands), and so you need to design your sounds from the beginning
with this frequency limitation in mind. Mobile games are not console
games. h ey're not $60, 40-hour, immersive experiences; they tend to
be cheap little time-killers, played while waiting for something else to
happen in your life. Console games are a major commitment of time and
money; mobile games are light entertainment, designed to be thrown
away after a few uses. Because of that, mobile game audio is maybe less
important than for Xbox titles. Some of my colleagues may consider
this blasphemy, but I believe it's true nonetheless. I usually phrase it as
'
nobody plays the game with the screen turned of ', but you see iPhone
users running silent all the time.
However, this may be changing as tablets become more ubiquitous,
and Beats-style studio headphones become more prevalent. As modern
games target mobile platforms, the importance of sound increases. And
in h e Future, when social gaming is done via h e Cloud, the ability
to communicate with other players via voice network, and share audio
streams, will bring that elusive
'
immersive experience
'
out into the real
world.
”
