How To Make Sound Effects For Games

Game Audio Basics

7 May

Overview

‘Sound Effects’ can seem like a strange subcategory of game audio initially - aren’t all sounds sound effects?

Defining what sounds belong to this category is hard as it’s quite subjective and the lines are very blurred. These categorisations in the following chapters are intended mainly as a rough guide to help you organise your projects, redesigns and audio tests, and work out how best to approach the different aspects of each.

This framework also allows us to communicate better with our peers and split up the workload by assigning team members to separate disciplines.

What Are Sound Effects?

Sounds that belong in the sound effects category are often in ‘direct focus’ for the player, and come from an action being performed in the game. This covers everything from weapons and explosions to vehicle sounds, user interfaces and creature vocalisations.

As I said before, choosing which sounds belong in the SFX category is very subjective, so try to see it as more of a spectrum than a hard-and-fast set of rules. For example, an explosion could be considered part of the ambient soundscape if we were playing a game set in a large-scale warzone like Battlefield, so don’t get too hung up on rules and definitions, and find a system that works for you.

How Do I Make Sound Effects?

Audio Pillars

Whenever I am given the task to design a new sound, the first thing I do is think about what it needs to do in the context of the game. These ‘audio pillars’ can be a really helpful framework to keep in the back of your head and guide your creative decisions.

They state that audio in your game should:

Enhance the narrative
Give positive/negative feedback to the player
Provide important information
Bring the visuals to life

Each sound is one piece in the puzzle of the soundscape and should immerse the player into the game world, so before you open your DAW, take a moment to think about what you want the sound to do, and how you want the player to feel when they hear it.

References & Inspiration

Starting from a blank canvas (or blank DAW project) is really hard. A great way to make it easier for ourselves is to find good reference material to help get the ball rolling. You can visit our Inspiration page to find some incredible curated sound design content from around the community: https://www.gameaudiolearning.com/inspiration

I also recommend checking out the YouTube channels below, which have amazing isolated sound design references without any music.

Full playthroughs of games with no music: https://www.youtube.com/c/GamesWithoutMusic

Isolated voice lines and sound effects from popular games: https://www.youtube.com/c/EvilBanana202/videos

Isolated weapon sound design: https://www.youtube.com/c/Ultraclocked

Experimentation

You can learn all the theory in the world but at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you do the practice and create sound effects that sound good in context with the game. This requires a lot of trial and error, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, then putting it into the game and iterating on it until it’s right.

Experimentation also helps us innovate - it’s important to remember that there are no rules in sound design. Anything goes as long as it sounds good. This short video is a reminder of that: https://youtu.be/eOKIMbJQO1Y

If you’re interested in developing your sound design skills then check out the Learning Roadmap’s “Getting Better At Sound Design” chapter, in the “Practice & Build Your Network” tab.

How To Implement Sound Effects (Technical Sound Designer)

Sound effects can be implemented in a large variety of ways, but here are some of the most basic and common ones you’ll find.

One-Shots

A one-shot will play the sound through in its entirety and then stop, with no looping or change to its start/end points. Take a footstep, for example - the foot touches the floor and then we play a random footstep from our dirt footstep sounds.

Looping Sounds

As the name suggests, these are sounds that keep looping once they are triggered. This means they need a start and a stop event in the game that tells the engine when to begin and end playback.

Play/Start/Stop Events

To oversimplify, playing a sound in a game requires a line of code that essentially says: ‘if X happens play Y sound’ and if it’s a looping sound then: ‘if X happens start/stop Y loop’. We can use these events within our game to trigger sounds depending on the actions of the player. This can range from a simple button press in the UI which plays a sound, to more complex collision detection that triggers an impact sound when a character gets hit by a projectile.

This aspect of implementation will often involve working closely with gameplay programmers. They will be able to create code “hooks” which can play, start and stop our audio events at the precise times needed.

Animation Tagging

Animations are used all the time in game development to make the characters come to life. Sound designers can make use of these animations and play audio in sync with them by tagging events on the animation timeline. Then each time the animation reaches the tag, it triggers an audio event.

Taking the footstep example from before, we can add an audio event to the walking animation that tells the game to play a footstep sound each time the foot hits the floor. Here is a great 2-minute video showcasing this in action: https://youtu.be/b2jxtbmWlKQ