Summary - What Makes Great Game Sound?

George Spanos
What Makes Great Game Sound?
(retrieved from http://www.gamesounddesign.com/WhatMakesGreatGameSound.html)

Sound is generally recognised as an important part of games. But on what scale can you measure that quality?

Obviously, composing techniques are important in enhancing your sound files to a certain level of quality. But at the heart of good game sound stands a good idea, a central theme, in the way that all forms of entertainment each have a central theme. Without this theme, game audio can only be so much.

A technique to support this central theme is by breaking situations in a game down into separate, very specific, cues, and then support those cues as well as possible with sound, and leaving out everything that does not directly support that cue at the time. This focuses the player on the events you deem important as a game designer, and that can keep the player aware of the essence of what is happening at any time in the game.

Besides greatly focusing on the supportive role of audio, this has some other advantages. By reducing the number of sound files heard at once, memory is saved in both file size and RAM load. More importantly however, is that by supporting important game cues, it is easier to attain a higher degree of adaptivity, since the cues are all the game system would care about when determining what sound to play.