The Game Audio Strategy Guide

A Practical Course

Gina Zdanowicz, Spencer Bambrick

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351016414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Game Audio Strategy Guide is a comprehensive text designed to turn both novices and experienced audio designers into technical game audio pros. Providing both a theoretical foundation and practical insights, The Game Audio Strategy Guide offers a thorough look at the tools and methods needed to create industry-quality music and sound design for games. The text is supported by an extensive companion website, featuring numerous practical tutorials and exercises, which allows the reader to gain hands-on experience creating and implementing audio assets for games.

The Game Audio Strategy Guide is the essential manual for anyone interested in creating audio for games, inside or outside the classroom.

1

Getting Started

Welcome to The Game Audio Strategy Guide: A Practical Course. This book is the culmination of years of experience as sound designers and composers for games, as well as years of teaching at college and graduate level. At some point we realized that all of the methods and approaches that we use professionally, and teach to our students every day, should be compiled in one place so the budding game audio professional might be able to access them easily. On top of that, we hold a great amount of respect and passion for game audio as well as educational practices. With that, we combined our knowledge into what we hope is a successful dissemination of the theory and practice of game audio. We’ve also included many tips and tricks from other working professionals in the field, and offer some real-world examples of topics we discuss. Before we get started talking about what game audio is, let’s cover what game audio isn’t.

Game audio as a process isn’t a particular set of directions that you can learn or copy. Rather it involves understanding games at a critical and technical level. Much like programming and engineering, game audio will require you to think outside the box and problem solve, to arrive at appropriate solutions for your game. You will need a wide breadth of skills and theoretical perspectives to do this effectively. In some ways game audio is more about finding a variety of answers than finding the right answer. In this book we will not give you a “one size fits all” solution. Instead we will offer our philosophy and theory of game audio, and enough practical knowledge, so that you can come up with your own solutions. This, we believe, is more valuable than a single step-by-step manual.

Game development can be creatively rewarding and enjoyable, but is certainly not without its difficulties and challenges. The field of game audio is always evolving and covers a wide variety of defined specialties such as sound design, music composition, field recording, voice-over production, orchestration, implementation, and many others. Whether you are at the start of your career or somewhere in the middle of it, it is always a good time to evaluate your skill set and look at opportunities for improvement. Having multiple skill sets can help push your career forward and make your day-to-day work more interesting. Even in specialized technical positions, learning seemingly disparate skills can come in very handy, and even provide creative solutions that you may never have thought of before. Reading through this book you will find that we consistently advocate for learning as much as you can about the game development process overall, rather than narrowing your view to one part of one field within the game development process. To reiterate: resourcefulness and the ability to think “outside the box” in both creative and technical approaches will greatly help you along in this fast-paced industry.

As teachers, mentors, and game audio advocates we seek to nourish a sense of creative problem solving in those who wish to enter the industry or further their career development. If learning to approach game audio with a creative and analytical mind sounds appealing to you, then let’s begin our journey!

Our Goals for this Textbook

We had three goals in mind when we set out to author this textbook. First, we wanted to present a theoretical and practical framework for teaching game audio that goes beyond the basics. There are fantastic books on the market that outline the basic theory of game audio, and there are equally effective books that offer a more practical guide. This textbook, along with our Sound Lab (companion website), is both. You will start by learning the basics of nonlinear audio, and by the end of the textbook you will have experience with practical sound design and music composition as well as implementation into middleware. Along the way there will helpful assignments, thought experiments, and resources for further study.

Our second goal was to bring as much information on game audio as possible into one place. Students can cobble together loads of useful information from various sources on the internet, but we wanted to provide something more. This book is meant to be a cohesive account of game audio from the fundamentals all the way through the more advanced topics. If anything, the subject matter is weighted considerably more toward intermediate concepts because they are harder to find elsewhere. Still, we’ve worked hard to make sure that the subject matter moves logically and cumulatively so that each topic builds on the last in a way that makes it digestible for students. Using this book, a beginner looking to get into game audio will learn the foundations quickly and move confidently into intermediate and advanced topics.

Our final goal was to begin bridging the gap between academia and industry practice. We are ardent advocates of education and, simply put, we want to see an emphasis on game audio pedagogy. We want to see more college- and graduate-level programs specific to game audio around the world, ideally within game development programs themselves. Game audio is not separate from game development, it is a specialization within game development. Likewise, game audio is not separate from academia. Brilliant minds like William Cheng and Tim Summers¹ have written illuminating papers and books on the topic of ludomusicology, the scholarly analysis of music in the context of video games. This writing has done a great service to the field of game audio by reinforcing its validity as an academic topic, paving the way for more research and analysis. In a similar vein we hope to make industry practices more accessible to academic programs, and conversely to make academia more present within industry practice. This manner of “cross-pollination” can only lead to a deeper understanding of game audio practices, which will lead to more pedagogy-focused game audio programs. In turn, the presence of more game audio programs will yield a highly competent and technical field of game audio professionals.

Overview and Learning Outcomes

This book is meant to be viewed as a course that will take you from introductory topics in game audio, to more intermediate asset creation, and then on to more advanced implementation practices. In a very strong sense the textbook itself can be thought of as the lecture component of a course, and the Sound Lab (companion) website can be thought of as the lab component. We cannot overstate the importance of the companion site. It is not supplementary material; it is a core component of this course. Lectures alone can only get you so far without making use of the lab (on the companion site) to internalize the theory. Paying attention to the assignments and coursework here will also get you started on your demo reel and portfolio (see “Demo Reel,” Chapter 11, page 358).

We begin this text with an introduction explaining how this book should be utilized and why you should read it. We also outline the roles on a game development team and identify the responsibilities of an audio designer within this paradigm. The size and features of game development studios are broad and diverse, but we will outline some common examples of small-, medium-, and large-scale projects.

In Part I we discuss all aspects of sound design, including techniques and practices from recording to editing and how to address the challenges that stem from working with nonlinear media. We cover the essential tools and skills you will need to succeed as a sound designer on your own and with a team. We also cover the production cycle and planning for various platforms.

Part II is focused on adaptive music. We begin by discussing methods and strategies for generating musical ideas as they relate to real-world game projects. We also discuss techniques and practices for arranging and orchestrating sample-based music and live orchestral cues.

In Part III we explore audio engines, implementation, resource management, optimization, and interactive mixing. We finish by detailing techniques for complex adaptive music systems and dynamic mixing along with a discussion on the creative and aesthetic nuances of experimentation within the game audio framework.

Finally, in Part IV we cover topics on the business end of the game audio field. We will discuss networking, contracts, and marketing yourself in the era of social media. We will also go into some of our personal thoughts on industry ethics and how they fit into a globalized game development industry ethic.

Game audio is an essential component of a vast and ever-expanding industry. It is affecting and artistic in its own right; it breathes life into the worlds that artists and programmers create. It is our hope that this book will help make learning the craft of game audio more accessible and rewarding for students of all levels. Underlying our desire to share our passion for this field is our belief that game audio is special, and that everyone should have the means to appreciate it as we do.

Who Should Read this Book?

This book is intended for readers with some experience with digital audio and music composition. Readers should also be familiar with a variety of games. Our rationale for this is simple – there are already tons of helpful sources in books and on the internet that cover these basics. What we want to offer with this textbook is a quick look at the fundamentals as they apply to game audio. Most people don’t try to score a film if they have never seen one before, and this applies to games to an even greater degree. Games are nonlinear, and it’s hard to understand nonlinearity if you have never played a game before.

After covering the fundamentals of game audio, we will focus most of our time on intermediate and advanced topics ingrained in the nonlinearity of games. Students looking to gain an intermediate and advanced technical knowledge of game audio are the target audience for this book. However, even if you are a complete beginner, don’t worry. The topics can be dense at times, but this book is self-contained. This means in each chapter we will cover everything you need to know to understand subsequent chapters. Beyond that, we have included a slew of other sources and reference for those interested in broadening their game audio studies.

Keep in mind that the terms we define and the opinions we share throughout this book are based on our professional and educational experiences. Some terms may be coined differently across various scenarios, and other audio professionals may have different opinions or techniques. This is why checking out our references and “Further Reading” section on the companion site (see below) can be extremely helpful for a well-rounded view.

To summarize, our intended audience includes everybody who wants an industry-level technical understanding of the theory and practice of game audio. As we have mentioned, this book is organized like a lecture/lab, so game audio teachers and students are prime candidates. As a close second, anyone either looking to get into game audio from other related fields, and anyone teaching themselves game audio will (we hope) find this book indispensable. Likewise, experienced people in the industry can use this book to gain insight into other views and methods in game audio. Finally, those from other disciplines (like film and TV audio) looking to move into game development will find this book useful as well. It will help in understanding the vast amount of technical and creative work that goes into creating and implementing sound effects and music for games. If nothing else, an experienced game developer will finish this book with a vastly greater respect for the game audio process.

How to Use this Book

This textbook can be used in a few different ways. Our recommendation, of course, is to read it all the way through in order. This will give readers the fullest sense of what it takes to produce audio for games, and to develop a sustainable career doing so. Our Introduction sets the foundation for what game audio is and what our approach to teaching it will be. Parts I and II involve sound design and music respectively. We have chosen to cover sound design first because many of the elements in Part I will make the discussions in Part II very easy to understand.

If you are specifically interested in either sound design or music only, then feel free to read the Introduction and then jump straight into the relevant chapters. We would encourage you to read all relevant chapters entirely. As we mentioned earlier, this course is cumulative. Skipping Chapter 2 may leave you fumbling for answers in Chapters 3 for example. It will be helpful to read through all of Part IV regardless of your speciality. Career development is essential to all areas of game audio.

Readers may also want to use this book simply as a reference for industry techniques and best practices. This is perfectly fine. Just be sure to use the Sound Lab as appropriate to cover the practical aspects of game audio. We’ve also included a detailed glossary of terms on the companion site, and plenty of references as well. As stated earlier in this chapter, one of our goals was to compile as much information on game audio as possible so that it would be accessible in one place. Here it is!

Requisite Knowledge

Despite the fact that this text dives into some highly advanced topics, we do our best to assume little or no prior knowledge. That said, this book covers so many interdependent fields that some prior knowledge is helpful. For starters, a bit of experience with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is vital. The topics covered here are DAW agnostic, so any particular DAW will do, but it should be industry standard (i.e. Logic, Pro Tools, Reaper, but not Garageband). You don’t need to be an expert, but familiarize yourself with the process of using plugins and virtual instruments in your DAW so you can get a feel for the basic workflow. It can also be helpful to learn the fundamentals of signal processing since there are some technical mixing concepts discussed.

In terms of prior musical knowledge, the fundamentals of music theory are a must. By this we mean you should be able to read musical notation. This will help you in understanding the composition and orchestration concepts covered in Part II. You should have a basic understanding of diatonic harmony as well. We will be using roman numerals at times to describe various chord progressions. Apart from this, we assume no knowledge whatsoever of implementation or game design.

Theoretical Framework

We like to start each chapter or section by laying out the topical theory. By this we don’t mean a hypothesis of an observation. Rather we will lay out as simply and clearly as we can the topic of discussion in a broad sense. We also try to include our personal philosophies on the topic’s place within game audio and within the field of game development as a whole. This is to help you formalize a mindset that will suit you when working on your own projec...