Think about why you need sound at the first place: Ears are one of the two (in VR three) stimulated senses in gaming. But often developers tend to focus on the visual perspective of games, what makes music and sound seem like a limping second leg. To use the full power a great game sound can provide you, follow our small guide. Don`t just add sounds to your finished game as last step. Use your sounds as active storytelling elements and lead your player through your game - unconsciously and consciously - it makes things a lot more immersive and also easier for you. Your player doesn't find the church he is supposed to visit? Just let in ring.
Without needing an active thinking process, an emitted sound immediately gives information about:
Besides information, a good game sound also tremendously increases the immersivity of your game world. Generally, sound has its strengths in providing:
After this general overview, they are a few things more to think about when making your sound list
Especially for character movements you need different states per source. Talking about footsteps, this can be several walking speeds, surfaces, boots and weights.
Sounds, which are to be triggered very frequently (such as steps, hits, little voice overs) need different sample versions, to avoid the machine gun effect.
For atmospheres, its useful to combine different indirect and long stereo ambiences (crackling wood, wind, distant birds) with shorter, direct mono sources, like singe bird screams, which you place at different spots of your map.
Especially for larger project it makes sense to divide your source list into different categories first, such as: character movement, character voice, ambience wilderness, fight, user interface and so on…
In total, our medium sized indie - projects mostly need about 1000 sounds. We`d love to help you with your sound asset list for free - just get in touch with us!
Few things make a game unconsciously feel as cheap as a bad sound. We at We LoveIndies only provide selected sounds proven in the worldwide creative market and handcrafted by absolute game sound experts.
Sound sourcing quickly ends up in a terrible mess of different file types (like .mp3, which is not seamlessly loopable), bad namings, missing meta data and missing files. On WeLoveIndies you can create scenes for your above mentioned sound categories. All sounds will be in the right place, perfectly tagged, named and formatted as 16. Bit, 48kHz wav-file. Ready for DragnDrop usage!
Establishing a creative product in a strongly fluctuating market can be a hit or miss endeavor. Tight budgets are a critical factor and often the reason for decisions made at the expense of the overall quality. Here you can choose between four different licenses for your project, starting with 0,5€ per sound – at full quality!
Use our high quality sounds for free for your unpublished pitches and prototypes. Just collect what you need, contact us and check: “Request free download for current project.”
Mix stock assets with custom made ones: Our experience has shown, that for many projects the solution lays somewhere in the middle: Use rather unobtrusive but necessary stock assets to pull the heavy load. Combine them with unique and branding custom-made ones, to lace the perfect game sound bundle. Just visit our “CUSTOM” tab.
Depending on the size and type of your project, we recommend different integration methods for your sounds:
For true indies. As much as we love the idea of from-scratch-development, audio engines have gone a far way to be as efficient as they are today. If you really plan to develop your own audio integration tools, we strongly recommend checking the documentations on the audio engines and middleware mentioned below first, to get an idea on the functionality, your audio tools should provide.
A reliable base. Game Development platforms such as Unity or Unreal already provide strong tools for audio integration. You have easy access to 3D placement of sound sources and even ways to modify the playback for sounds to avoid repetitiveness and create a lively sound. However, to take full advantage of the possibilities of truly interactive Game Sound, we recommend using an audio middleware.
Quick and efficient. If you worked already with any DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), FMod will be easy for you to understand. Fmod works very straight-forward and has amazing possibilities when it comes to interactive sound elements. For most game productions, especially those with audio-integrators coming from DAWs, Fmod is the perfect audio integration tool. But FMod comes in our eyes with one weakness: The easy and clean FMod looks at the beginning, the messy it can get with massive projects, since it has a very additive behavior. If you plan a huge project with thousands of assets, you maybe guess our next and last recommendation.
Massive and powerful. We don’t want to fool anyone here: Wwise doesn’t come very light and easy. It rather behaves like an elaborate asset organization tool and takes time to be understood. But if you use Wwise on really huge long-term projects, you will love its ability to structure everything. Wwise looks complicated at the beginning of a small project, but if the project grows, Wwise stays the same – organizing all interactive or related functions, asset versions and platforms intuitively and smart.
After having integrated your sounds, you will have to test, mix and balance all sources to create a realistic and well sounding game world. It’s good to have a fresh pair of ears for that last steps, since working on the same game scenes for hours often ruins the necessary objectivity. If you want us to make a quick audio quality check of your game for free, just get in touch with us! (Who would'nt want to play indie newcomers?)
We really hope, our small guide was somewhat useful for you! If you have any further questions, don`t hesitate to contact us – we love talking about sound and music!
Looking for special sound effects? Round off your bundle with uniqueness in the CUSTOM area!
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