My journey becoming a Unity game developer: Immersion Starts with Sound

Objective: Quick description into the importance of having sound in a video game.

Background music added to a game through an Audio Source.

Sound adds to a player’s immersion in a virtual environment. Like an engine running in a racing game, fans cheering or booing a team in a sports game, or the creeping noises in horror games.

Sounds in a video game such as voiceovers, music, UI sounds, weapons, and ambient sounds in an environment can help bring a game to life. It’s often dismissed to being the last step in game development. However, it will help you reinforce the ambiance you want in your game, and its best to match it with the graphics settings you have. Think of how these sounds can transport you into the game.

Sound tends to have a very subtle effect on how players perceive the quality of video games. There are 3 types of sounds we’re accustomed to in video games:

• Music: Music is used to enhance the player’s experience according to the situation.
• Sound effects(SFX): These are sounds that occur as a reaction to a player or NPC actions, such as clicking a button, walking, opening a door, shooting a gun, and so on.
• Ambient sound: Background or surrounding noise being present like an apartment in the middle of the city. When we stand still and listen, we should here things like cars in the street, an airplane flying overhead, a construction site two blocks away, maybe people talking outside, and so on. Lots of sounds should be heard, and the sources of most of them should be outside the room. We can place individual sounds all over the scene to recreate the desired ambiance, or we can combine them all into a single looping track and play as one piece of audio. This can cut back on over using the CPU and RAM resources to achieve believable results.

For almost all games, we will need at least one music track, one ambient track, and several SFX clips to start producing the audio for a game. Sound is a big part of achieving the desired gaming experience, so make sure to take the time to get it right.