Adventures in GameDev with GameDevHQ! Day 32: Immersion starts with sound.
Can you imagine playing videogames without any sound? If you think about it, sound design plays a huge part in videogames. From Marios unique jump sound to the types of music you hear almost subliminally in the background setting the emotional tone and ambience unique to that world or area. Don’t think sound is important? Imagine you’re playing a game and you blow up a boss ship and you see the huge explosion but there’s no sound to accompany it.
In bigger productions, there are actual Sound Designers who will figure out what needs sound in your environment. Caves will need drops of water, the soft fluttering of bat-wings and insects crawling everywhere, not to mention the howling air that flows from one crevice to another. Or say you’re an assassin walking along the rooftops, even though you’re silent as a black cat stalking its prey, you’re not in a sound vacuum. There’s birds singing, wind blowing, people talking far away, maybe the sounds of muffled footsteps of unwary travelers below, the sound of cloth hitting itself from flags and hanging drapery, horse clops, wind rushing through grass, every little thing can add more immersion and anything that’s missing can also have a huge impact of believability and break immersion. Imagine seeing a jar fall and break when it hits the floor but no sound emanates from it because someone forgot to include it. It’s a small detail but your brain will pick up on everything and sense something is not right.
If you’re working as an indy game designer, these are the kinds of things you’ll need to take into consideration. Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions from hiring or working with knowledgeable sound people, getting royalty-free sound effects and music, or making your own if you happen to have the musical and sound engineering knowledge.
No matter how you will be getting your sound effects and music, Unity offers us a wonderful component we can add to our GameObjects called the AudioSource component:
Tomorrow we’ll get into using this component to add sound effects to our game!
