Enhancing Sound Design for a More Immersive Experience

The days of limited sound effects in games are long behind us, but even with the advancements in 3D audio, many games still suffer from a lack of depth in their sound design. Sound design plays a crucial role in creating an immersive experience for players, adding subtle details that enhance the narrative and transforming games into engaging escapes. With the right approach, sound design can work wonders for the player experience, adding depth to both 2D and 3D environments and making virtual spaces feel more realistic. Here are some key principles gleaned from Unlock Audio's work on World of Mechs, which can be applied to improve worldbuilding with sound in any game. Considering the game's VR format, it was essential to design sounds that would be perceived from inside the cockpit of a giant combat machine. To achieve a massive feel, we added extra layers, reverberation, and sub-effects to essential sounds like movement and artillery fire, creating a density that would be missed if it were absent. The sound design would have been entirely different if the game were created from a third-person perspective, focusing on environmental sounds like the earthy crunch of an enemy mech advancing or the distant clang of ammunition hitting its armor. In real life, sounds rarely have abrupt beginnings and ends; they rise, fall, and linger. To create a more organic feel, it's essential to work texture into audio at the head and tail of core sound assets. Whether using available sound packs, recording samples, or synthesizing new sounds, the final output will likely be a multi-tiered combination of samples and effects. By building lead-ins and tails around these sounds, gamers can uncover more subtle information about the game world. For instance, a trailing reverb can add believability to the metallic character of a mech, while abrupt or quickly dampening effects might dull the impression. Just as sounds in real life don't often have an abrupt start or stop, loud tones are rarely perfectly sustained. A simple down pitch or up pitch can lend realism to any drawn-out effect or note. Finding inspiration from real-life cues can convey more to players naturally, like the climbing cadence of a glass filling with water as a corollary for recharging in-game technology. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple tremolo or warble on almost any sound to give it a pulsing effect that feels infused with energy. When encountering characters that are larger or more powerful versions of previous enemies, it's essential to achieve a meaningful, audible difference. This can be done by adjusting other layers, such as increasing blunt impact at the expense of intricacy. In World of Mechs, we engineered movement sounds for three tiers of robots: light, medium, and heavy. The size of each mech can be accented by more than its movement, but also in the sounds of its weaponry. Beyond size, sound can be scaled for other characteristics, such as the condition of differing factions or classes of machinery. Some mechs might be shiny and new, while others might be legacy rigs, battle-tested and worn. Both might share the same core mechanized sound but get treated with a different filter or sensibility to communicate a grander story. Through attention to details such as these, players can gain a sense that these giant combat machines, although different, are from the same time and made with the same manufacturing capabilities. As sound designers, we're tasked with a limited selection of assets that a game cycles through repeatedly, so it's essential to understand the succession of how each sound gets used to combat player fatigue. Take footfalls, for example. We could pool together a variety of stomps that the game engine pulls from random for a variable walk cycle, preventing players from zeroing in on a pattern. However, we're more likely to be tasked with just a couple of step sounds that play repeatedly, maybe adjusting only for different terrain. In these cases, it's crucial to mask the uniformity of the step cycle and soften the edges of the left-right-left-right sequence. If one of our mech steps included a high-pitched whine while the other let out a hiss, players would notice the perfect 1-2 repetition as they stomp their way across an arena. Although this might be amusing at first, the unrealistic conformity of that pattern would wear away at a player's immersion the longer they play. The same could be said for other repetitive gameplay mechanics, such as artillery bursts, reload sequences, and more. By playing with pitches, textures, and levels within each cycle, we can mask the obvious uniformities in our loops and keep players engaged. Just because an audio sample sounds great on studio speakers or headphones isn't a guarantee that it will sound great on the player's end. As sound designers, we must anticipate how games will commonly be played and ultimately heard, whether it's from small mobile devices or laptop speakers all the way up to hefty surround sound systems. While World of Mechs is geared toward the Meta Quest 2 headset, we also had to consider how the game may be cast to other screens or captured and shared on social media. Whether working in a state-of-the-art sound studio or on a couch, it's essential to play sound files on as high and as low a grade of equipment as available. This can lead to smarter tweaks and better-built sound satisfaction for all manner of gamers, even before the files get added to the game engine.