Context
Game Sound Design is an area GSI has invested significantly in the past years having developed a Pattern Language for Sound Design in Games (www.soundingames.com). Sound Design is a hard task in sequential media like cinema. In digital games it is made even harder by the fact that sound composition needs to be considered in the interactive context that is open to redefinition by player actions.
Current engine support for sound mostly focus on sound play and mixing techniques, possibly considering positioning and specificity of several sound sources as well effects that change over time. Game programmers need to manually control each sound source, setting its play timing and modifications according to what’s happening in the game scenario.
Sound Design is a technique that focus at a higher level and considers which sound elements serve each semantic purpose, as well as how these should be combined to produce desired effects. Soundscape design is a set of concepts and methodologies that try to support a holistic perspective of sound design in context and has been the foundation for developing the pattern language. It this project we intent to develop game engine support for developers to approach the problem of sound in games using these concepts, enabling experimentation of solutions for the problem of dynamic soundscape composition in games.
Objectives
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at the design and prototyping of a dynamic soundscape composition solution resulting in:
a) a soundscape specification language definition for gaming contexts;
b) a systematization for a dynamic composition technique in games;
c) a run-time dynamic composition module for a game engine;
To achieve this we propose to adapt an existing open source engine for experimentation in a project on game design and gameplay evaluation target at Android/iOS platforms.
Results
A functional demo system on top of FMOD and XNA that implements the base concepts involved in dynamically managing the sound compositions and 10 heuristics.
A short paper published at AudioMostly 2013, Pitea, Sweden.