A lot of game developers rather look at the visual side of arts and they don’t take in consideration the potential of a great Game Audio in indie games – which isn’t strange at all: We humans seem to focus much more on our eyes, then our ears.

This quickly leads to a misapprehension: sound is less relevant in the production of our games.

But even if visuals influence mostly our conscious impressions during playing, unconsciously the ears and what we hear has a massive impact on our overall feeling about a game. The fact, that sound and music often work subconsciously, makes them incredibly powerful – or extremely destructive for the players experience. Ears are one of the two (in VR three) stimulated senses in gaming!

In larger productions, Game Audio is often completely detached from the remaining production and handed to external experts. 

But if you are working in a smaller Indie Studio, you often have to take care of the audio for yourself. And even if you got someone at your side, its not easy to quality- test or even speak about audio at all.

This short article refers to all game developers, who are interested to get a bit more into Game Audio.

And – of course, it is meant as a quick overview, rather than it strives for completeness.

So, what exactly are we talking about? With “Audio” I refer basically to everything in your game, that is audible. This can be:

For this time, I want to focus rather on music and sound effects, as they are often the core elements of Game Audio.

It is my goal to look at them not as some necessarily to be integrated assets, but to unfold their true value for your next game.

To create a meaningful audio for your game, let us start with the following question.

And be aware, that the answer to this question is different for every project – I’m just trying to give you some thoughts on the way:

Sound naturally exists everywhere in our world and it comes with nearly every active handling and occurs even in most passive and “quiet” surroundings. Since games often orientate on “earth-like” surroundings, we can use sound in games as we use it as humans on earth:

A huge advantage of sound is, that in no time and without claiming much brain capacity, it gives information about:

Besides dealing with information, a good game sound also tremendously increases the immersivity of your game world.

Again, without distracting from any visual content! Generally speaking, sound has its strengths in providing:

To make it easier getting an overview of the often massive amounts of sounds, a game needs, it’s good to take a quick look, in what different forms sound can occur:

Frequently triggered sounds, such as steps, hits, little voice-overs, need different sample versions to avoid the machine-gun effect.

Use more than 4 sounds for an often-used sound, such as steps, screams, hits… Even if your integration tool supports random pitch modulation during playback.

Especially for character movements, you need different states per source.

Talking about footsteps, this can be several walking speeds, surfaces, boots and character weights.

Additionally providing several variations of each sound, this often sums up to about hundred single assets for walking sounds in a medium-sized indie game.

To create beautiful atmospheres, its useful to combine different indirect and long stereo ambiances (crackling wood, wind, distant birds) with shorter, direct mono sources, like singe bird screams, which you place at different spots of your map.

The more variety your atmospheres have, the longer your player wants to spend time in your scene.

Think also about a change in your atmosphere during day- or nighttime – often, in reality, they differ quite a lot, depending on traffic, animals, people…

Especially for larger project it is essential to divide your asset list into different categories, such as: character movement, character voice, ambiance dungeons, fight, user interface and so on. In my experience, medium sized indie – projects often need about 1000 sounds.

If you have all this in your mind, its time to start an asset list for the sounds you need for your game. If you want me to help you out for free with an audio concept, just get in touch at WeLoveIndies.com

The following chapter only deals with Game music – if you aren’t interested in that at all, just jump to the next chapter: “Source your assets”.

Where visual arts and sound often focus on information and simulation of reality, game music has completely different and very important roles – which none of the other art forms can express so convincingly.

Most of them deal with the emotions of your player.

To use the magic, a good game soundtrack can unfold, it is therefore important to have a musical and emotional idea in your mind.

Other than most visual stimulations – and other than sound effects, music doesn’t add necessarily more information to your game – but feelings. And that is good, if you know how to use it! Therefore, think about:

Having this in your mind, you can start making a list of music tracks, you may need for your game. If you like, we at WeLoveIndies.com can help you for free with this asset list!

Asset sourcing can be an annoying topic for every developer. Especially for sound and music there are endless providers online with different ups and downs and most of them are rather somewhat of a compromise. This is, why I decided to develop a Game Audio platform exclusively for Indie Game Developers.

In this chapter, I’m listing the things you should take care of when sourcing – and what I tried to make better on my platform.

Few things make a game unconsciously feel as cheap as bad sound or music. Our ears are extremely well trained and notice small mistakes or an overall bad quality in no time.

And your player will often hear the same sounds for several hours – don’t let him suffer!

We at WeLoveIndies.com only provide selected sounds and music proven in the worldwide creative market and handcrafted from Dynamedion (Europes largest game Audio Studio) and BOOM (one of the world’s largest sound effect libraries).

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. Nobody pays back your expenses when your game did not succeed. And at subscription-based payment providers you should be careful, how long your license lasts after your subscription expired. Often, these providers impress with a massive amount of assets, but with rather low quality. Within my platform you can choose between four different licenses for your project, starting with 0.5€ per sound– at full quality. You can also use all assets for free for your unpublished pitches and prototypes – without any financial risk at all!

Especially sound sourcing quickly ends up in a terrible mess of different file types, bad naming, missing meta data and missing files.

Also, some providers deliver in not seamlessly loopable formats like .mp3.

Use rather unobtrusive but necessary stock assets to pull the heavy load, and combine them with unique and branding custom-made ones, to lace the perfect game audio bundle. I’d love to help you out with a good audio concept for your game – as you see, I really love talking and writing about game audio!

Getting the audio assets into your game, can be a quite tricky task. Integrating sounds or music comes with different difficulties:

Game Audio in indie games

The musical arrangement is separated into different layers, which can be played separately or together.

The music is divided into different blocks, which can be used as modular elements.

Short musical interjections, often an about 2-15 seconds long-phrase.

Choose your tools wisely. Depending on the size and type of your project, I’d recommend different ones for your audio (but always the same on one project):

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 really strong tools for audio integration.

You have easy access to 3D placement of music 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 and lively Game Audio, we recommend using a professional audio middleware.

Quick and efficient. If you worked already with any DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), FMod will be easier 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 my eyes with one weakness: The easy and clean FMod looks at the beginning, the messy it can get during massive projects, since it has a very additive behavior.

If you plan a huge project with several 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 music, you will have to test, mix and balance all sources to create a realistic and well sounding game world.

For this last step, it’s helpful to have a fresh pair of ears, since working on the same game scenes for hours ruins the necessary objectivity. If you want me to make a quick audio quality check of your game for free, just get in touch with me!

I hope, my small guide was somewhat useful for you! If you have any further questions, don`t hesitate to contact me – we love talking about sound and music – We Love Indies!

So, if you are looking for a company for the creation of games, advergames, AR/VR experiences, send us a message. www.gladiogames.com - info@gladiogame.scom