Game Audio 101: Technologies

Overview

Regardless of the route in game sound you might be interested, this article offers a broad scope of technologies relating to game audio creation process. Although we are working with sound, there will be unusual suspects unique to game audio. Tools such as ‘middleware’ is mentioned later on.

Software Tools

Sound assets will need to be recorded and processed at various stages of the development. Software editing tools, be it the traditional DAW, video editing software or newer 3D game specific tools (MiddleWare),

See a list of game audio software tools here

Audio Editors

Assets such as audio files will very likely need to be trimmed or re-sampled to optimize for delivery. Standard software editors are used to process and layers sounds.

  • Any premium DAW or web tool
  • Free sound file editors (Audacity )
DAW are used to edit audio and compose music for games

Middleware

Audio Middleware is a specific type of DAW for gaming. Middleware implies that it be a cross-platform solution for delivering audio assets that are responsive depending of the user. Features such as 3D distance could be input to manipulate the in real-time.

FMOD is a Middleware for Game Audio

Coding IDE

The software that programmers will use to create and manage coding assets. Using an IDE the programmer will script behaviors that incorporate the sound recordings made.

There are different levels to the IDE that range from “lower to higher” level programming. The lower the level, the more power however, more complex to maintain. There may be other apps that allow script editing such as any text editor. Note, the tools mentioned in this article have the ability to ‘compile’ code into machine language on a variety of devices or operating systems (Beyond scope of this article). Gaming IDE’s are similar but will regularly depend on the platform specific IDE to compile the final assets.

Major IDE:

  • Xcode
  • Visual Studio
  • many more

Gaming IDES:

  • Unity
  • Unreal
Unity is a sandbox for game development

Microphones

Capturing the sounds for a virtual environment or a dialogue performance will be desired in the highest quality. One type of microphone might be used for the voice actors and another one for field recordings of sounds in the world.

Gaming Devices

  • Major Consoles
  • Computer, Mobile & Tablets
  • Virtual & Augmented Reality

Conclusion

There are several technologies that are related to the role of audio in gaming. We didn’t do a deep dive into a particular technology but, we now have a good overview of what is involved in the pipeline. Keep exploring into the technologies further.

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