Missing minor in digital audio design
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Developing a digital game in a group of five game design students in four minors – game design, programming, graphics, and project manager, some may note that one minor is necessarily missing. In a cross-functional small team developing a game, optimally anyone can take a part as a sound designer, and contribute to the project in a best way as he or she can, although quality may vary, based on previous experience, skills, musical nature and nurture. Some student groups already have musical member(s), another groups have to improvise and learn. For experimental student game projects, it’s still acceptable solution to involve another student member in different minor to replace a missing sound designer. One would acquire new skills and get experience when composing digital music tracks and sound effects (SFX) for the game.
The digital games are complex interactive multimedia artifacts, including graphics, animation, digital audio, text, etc. The digital games provide experience of sensation that involve using our senses, primarily seeing and hearing a scene during the gameplay. This create a conduit between game and player in a form of feedback. For example, video games are usually designed to provide combination of both, visual and audio feedback to players, whereas audio games provides only audio feedback, without any visual elements. Former are games in mainstream production, later are targeted to specific audience, e.g. blind and visual impaired. Still, both of them are digital games. Nonetheless, digital game development require a sound designer providing digital audio file assets, i.e. SFX or music. The participation of sound designers in the project is similar to graphics artists, and involves providing variety of sound assets, in different stages and quality levels, from elaborations, placeholders, to final versions with best possible quality. However, creating SFX or composing music without already existing visual parts of the game can lead to odd results – sounds that are not in harmony with graphics, and out of the gameplay context. It’s rather a good practice then a rule, that sound effects are designed with a reflection to existing visual parts and the gameplay. Thus sound designers more or less follows graphics artists and coders. Composing sounds for a game is a complex cognitive process that involves e.g. careful observation of the visual object(s) on the scene together with sensible imagination of meaningful sounds; search for original or imitated sound sources; sound recording and sampling; loop experiments with different samples, functions and attributes; and all above in respect to the context of the gameplay. That efforts generally result in some form of digital samples. Digital samples can be exported to some audio file format, uncompressed or compressed, supported by the game engine or framework (i.e. RIFF or WAVe), and finally used by developers in the game source codes. Ideally, a game designer with minor in digital audio should know how to create audio samples, SFX or music, and apply them in a game engine used in the project (i.e. Unity), thus he or she could be able continuously integrate his parts during the development, spend more time doing, less time queuing.  |
