Introduction

Making a modern game is a process of intense collaboration, and we hope to provide you with the tools and knowledge to make an important contribution to that process. Although you might be an audio specialist, the sound, music, and dialogue in the game are only going to be as good as the systems that trigger them or feed them with gameplay information. This is why we will take you not only deep into the audio, but will also help you to understand the game systems behind it.

This book is driven by two beliefs. The first is that people learn best about game audio by implementing audio in real games. The second is that the greater the integration we can have between the game designers and the audio designers, the greater the opportunities for audio as part of the gameplay experience.

Middleware solutions such as WWise, FMod, and others can provide great tools, and we would encourage you to learn these as well, but we want you to get experience working in real game scenarios and to be able to be proactive, not just reactive. You don’t want to be waiting around for a designer or programmer to implement something that, with a little knowledge, you could do in 30 seconds. Having this knowledge about the systems behind the audio will allow you to have real control, to be more involved in the game’s production, to be able to build prototypes for your ideas, and to influence the game’s development through a shared common toolset that everyone can understand and relate to. The Unreal Engine is behind many of today’s biggest games and provides us with this opportunity.

Game audio is not about learning a piece of software, since software changes all the time, and as you move from company to company, you’ll always need to learn new tools as most games use internal or proprietary systems for their audio. The concepts and theory you’ll learn here are transferable to any game audio engine or middleware that you might come across, and the visual scripting paradigm you’ll become familiar with is a fundamental part of almost all modern game development tools.

The approach we’ve taken will allow you to gain real hands-on experience developing audio within a commercial game engine while also equipping you with the skills and knowledge to apply this learning in the future to other game engines and platforms you may encounter. By understanding the means of production, you won’t just be the passive provider of assets but will understand the game design process, allowing you to get involved, to experiment, and to innovate.

We hope you find this book useful.

Richard and Dave