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Being a composer is one thing. Being a composer for a computer game sometimes also means being the sound designer, which in turn means… sound effects (sfx for short).

So far things have been simple in Resonance in terms of implimentation. Some music here, a few (let’s say a dozen) sfx there. ok.

But with this new room/scene, where things are really scary, we have been discussing forever really and only very recently (read over the weekend) we decided on the general plan: mainly NO music. Which is a pain in the arse let me tell you. No music means that sfx are out in the open! It means that you need lots more. Thus far I’ve completed more than 20 and I’ve still not touched several ‘categories’! Imagine that!

But this is turning to be a great scene! Really scary! So scary that it got my younger son scared. “Not again!” and he started crying. I wish I had a camera somewhere to prove that it is true, as nobody will believe me in the end.

We have, both me and Vince XII, realised that it is important to balance silence with music, sfx, with total silence and go for the optimal solution in every scene. And it is a pleasure working like that.

In addition to sfx, there are certain key moments in the specific scene, where music starts and is timed, as much as it can be. Which certainly creates a few problems, no? Not every computer is the same and no computer will enjoy playing 6-7 ogg files at the same time! Playing these magnificent format has one fault; it takes plenty of CPU power to playback (thus decompress on the fly) an ogg file, more than an mp3 file and much more than a wav file. If the game ends up being distributed via CD/DVD, then no problem. But if it is downloadable then there might be a few problems.

Further to playback the graphics and animation also takes up CPU power.

This certainly does not mean that the game won’t play on slower computers, but just that it will be… slower. Which is disasterous for any attempt to sync music events!

Take this simple example: A chassing scene. The hero is being chassed by vilains and everything leads to a big jump of a balcony, in a movie. The most logical thing is to start a “chase tune” which grows in volume and end it in a big bang, right before the jump. Well if this would happen in a game, it should be timed to the second in order to work. Imagine running, being chasses and jumping and the music having not yet reached the climax.

There is a way out however, by using different layers of music (this is why so many ogg files might end up being played together) which are timed backwards from the end.

I can’t say anything more without betraying the whole game, but trust me this is turning out to be a great experience for me and great pleasure to work on. This must mean something, right?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under Resonance Development, Computer Games Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.