I’m Kurt Larson; I do the audio on Stars Reach. Since we’re trying to communicate our vision to the players, I thought I’d try to give some insight into how we are approaching audio on the project.
I have responsibility for our audio, but the creative-approval team also includes Raph and our head of game design, Dave Georgeson. We talk about high-level goals, and I implement and find the devils in the details. I am in my 32nd year of working on game audio, so of course I bring my own philosophies to bear. I’ll share some of them here for those interested in how our project is being made.
CONTEXT
One of the first questions I ask when interviewing with a new team for a possible job is “What do you want audio to do for your project?”. I generally don’t expect a really in-depth answer because most game developers have never had to articulate that before. But I learn a lot from what I hear. The answers I hear the most are:
- “Well, what do you think it should do?”
- “I guess… um, tell the player about what is happening; to convey information.”
- “Wow, I really don’t know, but we need someone to handle audio because we can’t keep doing it ourselves; we have other things we need to be doing.”
From that I learn something about what the team needs and wants. On the times I have been hired, I keep asking that question of various people until I have a sense of what they expect. Usually most teams just really need someone who isn’t actually supposed to be doing something else to plug in all the audio assets. But I can usually develop a sense of what the major stakeholders want to accomplish in an artistic, player-experience sense. I also believe one of my jobs is to tell the team what their audio should be doing in each instance. In our case, combining what Raph and Dave have expressed with my own love of the game, I have arrived at this: That the purposes of game audio are:
- To provide an additional layer of pleasure and gratification for the player which is vastly cheaper to create than graphics.
- To add a sentient, emotional voice to the game which is always speaking, gently and quietly, about the meaning of their context and their experience.
- To make what you see feel real. Art and graphics make it look ‘real’, within the realism of the established art style. Audio ensures a strong connection between the player and that fiction which they inhabit.
To convey information and context.
MANIFESTO
OUR AUDIO WILL BE:
- Pleasurable: Like color, animation, and gameplay itself, audio can and should be a direct source of enjoyment for the player; bypassing the cognitive process and gratifying the brain at a sensory level. If a game is a joy to hear, the player is more likely to play more often and for longer. This contributes to player retention and thereby the overall success of the product.
- Blended and harmonious: Every sound needs to fit into every context in which it may find itself. (And every context needs to accommodate any of its sounds) Sounds heard well in isolation may not sound well together. Attention must be paid to the higher-end noise content; not only transients but sustained noise components, like water falling, “Energy” sounds, etc. Too many sounds competing for the higher-frequency segments of the listening experience can create aural discomfort.
- Interactive and adaptable: Star’s Reach is the most proc-gen, open-ended, vast-possibilities, combinatorial-explosion project on which I have ever worked, and the audio will need to make full use of everything I have learned about these things. Almost all sounds should draw from multiple granular randomized layers. The background ambience and music must adapt intimately and intelligently to the changing conditions of the world through which the player moves. The un-scripted nature of our players’ intended experience mandates that our audio leans more towards procedurally-generated philosophy than to a more scripted, film-like approach.
With those general ideas here to set the context, in the next post I will look at the details; breaking down different layers of audio design in a game and how each relates to Stars Reach.
Our Kickstarter is launching on February 25th! Head over to the Coming Soon page and sign up for notifications!