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Sound design is an incredibly powerful tool, as important as gameplay, art style and story. The way swords swish, enemies howl, doors and floorboards creak, health potions bottles clank — all of these subtle things can not only be a pleasant quality-of-life addition to a game expected by modern standards, but also affect the experience tremendously, being an important ingredient of the whole meal, especially if you’re focusing on an atmospheric side of the adventure you’re crafting.
Nowadays, it’s an essential part of the gaming experience — using a well-developed sound design can be incredibly crucial for your game’s success, sometimes in not very obvious ways.
Let’s investigate how tricky and valuable sound can be!
Back in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, games didn’t have a wide variety of sounds: they were mostly making one-note sounds with an occasional three-note victory tune or a two-note game over theme.
As games continued to be developed and expanded as the medium, developers started to pay more attention to the way games sound: they noticed that creating remarkable sounds goes well with the overall presentation of the game. It encouraged them to advance the sound technologies to improve the auditory aspects of games they were working on. A lot of their input has become essential for the modern gaming experience.
Nowadays, developers have many more tools and proficiency to create unique, high-quality soundscapes.
In modern games, music and sound design tend to take an approach similar to the cinematic one: it immerses you and creates an atmospheric experience. It also allows developers to enhance the gameplay elements to sharpen up the interaction players will have.
Let’s take a closer look at the ways modern sound design can be used in games to enhance the experience.
If the game looks nice and plays nice, it feels like a great product. But it is also worth it to make it sound remarkable and create a unique atmosphere that many players who love to immerse themselves into the game they play will cherish.
By creating a unique ambience, you allow players to feel as if they have stepped into the gaming realm, providing them with the one-of-a-kind experience they will love and remember for years.
Reverberated echoes of underground caves, choirs of alien animals in evergreen forests of another galaxy’s planet, loud steps of fire-breathing dragons awaiting you at the end of the dungeon — all these things turned out to be as important as great art direction to set up the mood, improve the atmosphere and make the experience truly memorable, going straight for players’ emotional perception of the game.
Sound allows to make the game mechanics even more intuitive. For instance, when you press a «fire» button on your controller, a gunshot feels like a real gun has just been shot. A stone plate you stepped on feels like a physical object that changed something in the game’s world. An enemy attack that was blocked by your trusty shield screeches with the sound effect that goes directly to your brain to confirm a successful blocking.
Sound provides you with the feedback, accompanying the game mechanics. Picking up an important item is usually also indicated with the distinct sound, alerting you and confirming your action. Two of the most famous examples are the gold-looting sound and a level-up sound from the Warcraft series. If you grew up playing this classic series, chances are that you have just heard these in your head!
Another way to use sound design effectively is to assist players with it. Some games have a lot of mechanics packed into them, and guiding a player with sound can be a very subtle and effective way to make experience more enjoyable and convenient.
A good example of a game that uses sound this way is the Call of Duty series.
In the game series that is rooted in a cinematic portrayal of a grounded military warfare, sound is obviously an incredibly important tool. In a single-player campaign, high-quality sound design helps to shape the cinematic experience the game is eager to provide, making it a good example of the atmospheric aspect of sound design we mentioned above.
But in multiplayer mode, enemies' steps and gunshots become a crucial tactical element, allowing you to navigate it with better spatial awareness. You can hear the loud stomps of the enemy above your head and prepare to catch your opponent off-guard.
There are even some in-game perks that enhance the enemies’ sound or mute your own steps, adding the additional depth to the core gameplay.
Another clever way to help players with the sound design is to attach a special sound to an especially dangerous enemy to indicate that this is the enemy that should be avoided at all costs. Not only do you assist players and warn them, but also create the unnerving atmosphere of danger, essential to horror and action titles.
Poison headcrabs in Half-Life 2, clickers in The Last of Us, mind flayers in Demon’s Souls, the chainsaw man in Resident Evil 4 — you will never want to miss them, and all these games do a great job at making sure you won’t.
Also, sounds can also be used in puzzle sequences of the game, making a challenging riddle more exciting to interact with.
Small cues can hint which buttons to press and in what order to solve a puzzle. Some puzzle games require you to hear a song and recreate it using the game’s musical instrument. Some games can even make you use headphones!
Altogether, it’s a creative approach that blends auditory and interactive mediums and will probably be remembered by players.
As you can see, atmospheric ambience and pleasant sound effects are absolutely essential. But the score of the game is also something that is an obligatory part of the modern standards.
Official soundtracks (OSTs) that help to shape up the mood of the set piece, be it a heart-pounding boss battle or the emotional finale, are something players expect nowadays and get excited about. Composers get recognition they deserve, passionate fans perform the covers of their beloved video game tracks.
Even though gameplay matters the most for a lot of players, they do care about the video game music. Some of the tunes represent a particular setting or a level, some of them are a character’s theme and some are here to make the gameplay even more exciting. In general, video game scores are an incredibly interesting topic that we may talk about in detail later.
Let’s take a look at why sound design is important for your project once more:
At RocketBrush Studio, we provide top-notch sound design services for all types of games Our team can handle different aspects of game audio and create an audio vision that fits your game. If you are looking for a unique sound design, feel free to reach out!
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