How designing sound first made my game feel better.
Let's ramble about sound, huh? Over the years, I started to create my own little sound workflow for my projects, and I would love to share some of my findings with you.
Using audio early in my projects
So, I'm a film editor by day and a game developer by night. And yes, that's a fancy way of saying I don't make any money with my games. Stop rubbing salt into the wound, you monster!
Anyway, over the years, I've edited movies, short films, commercials and everything in between - stuff for big and small screens. Every time I'm sitting in front of all that material, it's the same thing:
"I don't know what the hell I'm doing!" - me
It's that famous blank piece of paper, I guess. But I found something that helped me fill that piece of paper with just the tiniest bit of color: It's sound!
Sound first?
No matter what kind of project I'm working on, the first thing I'm doing every time I start a scene is putting some ambience into the timeline! It can be a very quiet room tone, some subtle wind, rain or a full-blown construction site massaging my ears into oblivion. It helps me so much to put that stuff into a blank timeline. Not only that, but it's the first little sign of life on the scene. Starting feels easier this way, and it helps with marrying my edits together better, especially at the beginning where everything is still very fragile. And yes, that's a fancy way of saying these early edits are bad. Stop calling me out, damn it!
What does that have to do with games?
Oh, right. I'm still new to all this, but I do the same things with my games. Audio comes fast in my workflow because it's essential to me and helps me experience the game world quickly and early in the process.
My first two games were made for game jams. So, they were short and I had a limited amount of time. When I started working on Snow Cone Serenade, I started with a complete outline of the story and places - broad brush strokes!
After that, I started on music and audio immediately. I explored my sound libraries for fancy wind sounds and calm winter breezes to marry them with my own artificial sounds, made with my synthesizers. And yes, I want to talk about synthesizers so bad, but that is too nerdy for this story. Maybe another time! It's all about layering things subtly together to get a more complex sound that's tailored to the scene you're creating. A lot of the sounds come from this great, free GDC library, which I highly recommend.
Audio & Video: A Happy Marriage.
Note that I started by creating the ambience, and then midway through, I started on the visuals for the scenes. So both audio and video were informing each other in some way. At least that's how it felt in my head.
I knew, early on, that I needed those cold wind sounds to be variable and change in intensity. So when our hero enters the house in the beginning, you have that wind both outside the house and inside, but at different intensities. I wanted that house to feel cozy and important. Muffling the sound and changing the ambience did just that for the game:
As soon as he stands up we fade out and switch to sound only!
I also incorporate little hazy sounds of the environment right into the ambience. For this street food shop, I added little sounds of cutlery, knives, and cooking in some places. The whole game takes place in this liminal world, and I wanted the sound to blend into the background for that:
Note that none of these sounds refer to the character actually, visibly cooking. They are just something you faintly feel in the background, when you play the game. There are no animations where he is sharpening his knife, handling the cooking wares, or anything like that.
The same was true of the first scene on the bench. He gets up, and then we fade to the house, while we hear him opening the doors, using the doormat and walking towards the scene - none of that is actually visible. That would not have been feasible within the scope of this little jam game. And yes, I'm bad at animation and possibly a bit lazy! Will you stop?
I tried to overcome those shortcomings in the animation department, with something that I'm able to achieve fast, and that, for me, is audio.
Three Doors
The three doors are probably the thing I had the most fun with in the game. I did this little mood system for the game, where you can choose between three different moods to give you a bonus on the skill checks in the game. These are basically little rolls of the dice. They are represented by doors with different colors that you can click on to open them and therefore choose the mood for your playthrough. So this decision needed a big, impactful sound!
The blue Logic Door got a bell sound. Kinda sounds like someone has an idea!
The red Ruthless Door is a deep, aggressive bass synth, representing brute force.
The pink Empathic Door is very smooth and playful melody because it deals with a more emotional approach.
Note that all these sounds are tonal, so they have a musical quality to them. The setup consists of another layer in the background:
A score in the that rises and falls, creating a drone-like tension, but always on a single note.
Therefore, it doesn't have any metric, making space for those door sounds that can play like little melodies on top of it, creating a score that follows the players timing! You can even test it above! Start the score tone and start randomly playing the different door sounds! That demonstrates the randomness of it pretty good.
What? You’re lazy??? Okay, here is the finished thing:
I was very happy with this result, even though my cool mood system was a little flawed. (A story for another day again!)
These bleeps & bloops make me feel stuff.
There is this concept of Game Feel, and the more I work on game audio, the more I realize that audio is a quintessential part of that mysterious game feel. Those doors feel more important with these little sounds added. My games are highly focused on narrative, and sounds helped me to enhance that narrative where it wasn't possible or feasible with visuals.
I'm not encouraging you to do the same thing as me, and write a bunch of music in the first week of your game's development and then throw it all away because your game is not that big. But I think there's a case to be made for at least thinking about audio early on in a project. When I started writing all the dialogues for Snow Cone, I often times played the music and ambience of the scenes in the background to get in the mood. I think that helped me come up with stuff a little bit!
Audio and music are my safe place. I'm sure yours is different! Using that to your advantage is probably a good start to improving your games, right?
And yes, I know that I'm starting to ramble at this point! Fine, I'll wrap this up. Wow.
You can play Snow Cone Serenade right now in itch or wishlist it on Steam!
