Audio for your Games

Hey Everyone,

I?m doing some research on what indie and individual developers are looking for when it comes to audio solutions, particularly for mobile platforms when developing their games and apps.

Long term my hope is to help small developers and individuals with tight budgets overcome some of their common issues, by offering up some simple solutions, so any answers you give will hopefully result in improving the ease of sourcing your sound in the future :)

There are a lot of free sound effects websites out there at the moment, as well as some pay for packs available too but it seems people often struggle to find these sites.

There?s also work involved in designing suitable sounds from the raw effects once you do find them and the extra process of getting the edited sounds into the correct formats for the platform and mastering them.

I have a few questions and if you can offer any answers then I?d be grateful.

1. What are the issues you most often encounter when trying to develop sound effects for your projects?

2. What formats do you use for your sounds when you get them ready for implementation? (mp3, wav, aif etc.)

3. What types of sound effects do you often struggle with the most? This is a vague question so any answers welcome but by this I mean are there any sounds where you specifically struggle to find source material? In addition to this, are there any particular sounds you struggle to put together from available materials online?

4. If you had the funds or connections to hire a sound designer to do the audio work for you and offer you a complete solution, what would you ask of them?

5. If you?ve developed multiple projects, are there any specific sound effects out there that you find yourself commonly requiring?

6. What issues do you commonly encounter regarding music for your projects?

Any other feedback no matter how small is very welcome; if you can think of any area relating to the audio for your games and apps that you?ve had issues with in the past then please post it up :)

Thanks in advance!

The main problem that I am running into in terms of Construct 2 and sound are the same issues that all HTML5 developers are having. The browsers cannot seem to get thier act together and implement the Web Audio API, which means that I am stuck with non-compressed WAV.

Why will Construct not integrate FLOD for tracker music? There is a javascript version of it.

which means that I am stuck with non-compressed WAV.

AlbertHall: What ? C2 automatically converts wav to either ogg or m4a which both are compressed formats.

Also C2 supports webAudio API as much as possible for you.

Please check this manual entry about music & sounds in C2.

That is correct , but unfortunately, only chrome supports those formats. Which means that if you want internet explorer users to be able to hear it, you have to only include the formats that are supported by both, which limits you to WAV.

The compression issue is less of a problem with C2 and more just HTML5 issues.

However, getting FLOD support in C2 would still be awesome.

photonstorm.com/flod

AlbertHall: Once again, sorry but you're wrong.

m4a (aac) is in C2 specifically for IE.

You might want to also check these (1, 2) Scirra's blog articles on the subject.

Agreed on the tracker format support though. Unfortunately THAT library is apparently only supported in chrome.

Hey Series3000,

was just quickly logging in but your post caught my interest. I have spent ages looking for sounds and music (and now have a vault with a massive collection of both) all free to use (you will have the option to donate if you start making any money this way).

There are so many great free to use sound effects in public domain. I literally spent days - maybe a week in total gathering up a nice collection.

In terms of what I found the hardest to find, was actually human voices. Like for games where you click on a unit for instance and hear a "Yes sir" and "OK".

Thanks guys, I really appreciate the feedback. I've ad a look at the browser support issues and it does seem like all browsers will support .m4a (except firefox) and .ogg is supported by all but IE and Safari. Very annoying but until they pull their fingers out and agree on a solution it looks like you're stuck with what's available now.

I don't think there's much I can do about it I'm afraid!

What I can do is offer .ogg and .m4a versions of my files when I make them available to download. It looks like construct will take care of encoding for you guys but I think developers using libgdx,for example, have to encode their data themselves.

Genki, it's great that you've spent the time compiling all the free sounds and music you could find. There is a lot out there but it does seem to be buried deep and takes some digging up. I'm surprised you struggled to find human voices; that's something I hadn't really thought much about but is something I could offer if there's a shortage out there. I've made a note!

If you can think of anything else that bugs you when you come to implement audio then please post it up; I'm working on finding the best way to present sound effects to developers so they can literally just plug and play without faffing about :)