Some sounds to avoid in your game…
How many times have you been driving down the road while listening to the radio and then heard a police siren suddenly come out of nowhere or a car start honking its horn at you? But then you realize it wasn’t coming from a real police car or angry fellow motorist, but rather from your own car speakers. Isn’t that aggravating? And it’s equally as aggravating to be instantly yanked out of a video game by similar types of real-world sounds coming from your game.
Of course, you can use any sound you want in a game but they have to be expected and unique. Most of the transgressions mentioned in this post involve sounds that are supposed to be ambient. If your game takes place in an office, then there will be phone rings and computer bleeps and bloops. These sounds are expected. But instead of using the most realistic phone ring sound you can find, you should craft a recognizable – but unique – phone ring sound. That way, the player will never be jerked out of the game and wonder who’s calling in real life. Similarly, don’t use computer sounds in your game that sound even vaguely close to Windows or Mac sounds. If a Windows “email received” or error sound is heard, the player will be tempted to alt-tab right out of your game.
You have to be very careful with traffic and neighborhood sounds as well. It’s not as disruptive an issue as the sounds coming from your car stereo but since everyone lives in some sort of neighborhood with its own real sounds, the ambient game sounds can possibly take a player out of your game. If your game takes place out in the country and you decide to have chainsaw or lawn mower sounds going on in the background, you run the risk of taking your player out of the game as they go to the window and prepare to curse at their neighbor who they think is mowing their lawn at 2:30am. If you do have these loud, disruptive types of sounds in your game at least make them unrealistic enough to not confuse your players.
We should always be striving to further immerse players into our games. Usually that means creating realistic and compelling sounds. But sometimes, especially with sounds that are common in our day to day lives, a little less realism is what’s called for.
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This blog is dedicated to topics concerning the creation of music and sound for games. It will deal with issues that come up in the day to day work of The Game Composer as well as thoughts on the industry as a whole. I hope it will be useful for developers and other game audio professionals. Feel free to contact me: thegamecomposer@gmail.com
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Good tips. In one of the game communities I watch, I see people actually reusing the default ICQ sounds… for a door opening. Incredibly obnoxious – I haven’t used ICQ in almost a decade but it still makes me want to alt-tab and see who IMed me.
Comment by Ben Garney | January 30, 2009 |
Haha, I would probably recognize that sound too. Sounds that are so tied to specific products or events need to be left alone. Recognizable fictional sounds are ok to play around with sometimes (outside of games of course)… I do enjoy using the Star Trek TNG “someone’s at the door” sound for when I get email. Makes me feel like I’m on the Enterprise for a millisecond at least.
Comment by thegamecomposer | January 30, 2009 |