Level 3 in Games DesignUnit 73: Sound for Computer Games

Level 3 in Games DesignUnit 73: Sound for Computer Games

By Ben Allardyce

The Last of Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y97u-U0nvJM#

I feel that Gustavo used this music to convey the emptiness of humanity throughout The Last of Us. The instruments that he used are very reminiscent of spaghetti westerns you can hear the similarities in this track at 1:50 -  2:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7z6zRbGhfg. This also fits well with the game play since in The Last of Us you can ride on horseback which is often associated with western style films. The music is important to set the tone of the game, The Last of Us is a very emotional game filled with tension, so this had to be put across in the music which I feel is done very well. Personally I don't think there is any Foley in this track, Foley is where you add sound effects into the track after it has been recorded. A great example of this is shown in this video at 2:40 - 3:20 where they show the creation of the sound effects for certain creatures in game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJyk5do5pq0
Timbre is what makes two instruments sound different even when they are playing at the same note and volume, timbre is made because the sounds resonate at different frequency. Waveform is the graphical representation of signal, this includes sound vibrations. The main theme from The Last of Us sounds like the wave length would be a lot longer and dragged out to create the slow tones in the background of the track.

I believe this sound isn't just to create emotion but also convey information, I believe that a lot of the tracks in The Last of Us symbolise loneliness, not just the main theme for example this track is also very sombre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYUErkvORWA
An audio environment is how the track is recorded and therefore listened to, for example surround sound is a system involving three of more speakers, this enables the listener to have a more realistic effect. For example in the main theme for The Last of Us at 0:34 to 0:40 there is footsteps in the background, when I listened to this with headphones it sounds as if the person is walking from one side to the other, this is stereo sound. Considering that Gustavo was hired by Naughty Dog and created the all of the music in house, I cant imagine there being many legal issues however the music would have to be copyrighted so no one else is able to use it without crediting the original artist. Gustavo would also have to be careful when creating the music, as to not use any copyrighted music or Foley.

Little Big Planet 3 OST - Dead Heat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HrZAK2lZ0g

Personally this I think that this music doesn't work very well, there seems to be a lot going on at once that kind of put me off the main theme of the track, however it doesn't seem to take itself too seriously which fits in well with the game.
 The track seems to give the sense of machinery and perhaps some sort of factory based level. From what I can hear there seems to be some Foley in this track in the form of beeping, especially at 2:49 to 3:00. This is a big part of what makes it technically different when compared to The Last of Us main theme. I can imagine that the timbre was a big part of this track as it would allow us to distinguish the different sounds created by the same notes and volumes. I think that the wave form of this track would be drastically different to the wave form of the main theme for The Last of Us. I think that the wave length would be a lot shorter for Dead Heat, as there are a lot of quick beats and drops.
I think the music symbolises the craziness of the game and how its not supposed to be taken as seriously as a triple A title like The Last of Us would be. The track 'Dead Heat' uses the audio environment of stereo sound to give the perception of natural sound your ears would hear. You can hear this at 2:47 - 3:02 in 'Dead Heat' when the beeping in the background is alternating ears, if you listen using stereo headphones. The sources of the music especially Foley can come from anything from professional instruments to garbage cans. They are then often edited in a studio to create the sound you are looking for.

Task 2

Due to The Last of Us being a massive game, and both that and Little Big Planet being developed for a very popular platform, the tracks can afford to be uncompressed, which therefore means its a higher quality of sound. On Windows it would be saved as a WAV file, it is designed to store a lot of different audio formats, including lossy  and lossless. Since WAV can store PCM, this makes it suitable to store the original recording. The audio files are probably passed around to been edited quite often and so there would have to be a naming system as to not confuse the files. An example of this would be Chapter1_Cutscene2.WAV. The bit depth is the number of bits in each sample, and they correlate to resolution of each sample. An example of this is that audio in DVDs can store up to 24 bits, so would have a bit-depth of 24. The bit depth affects the bit rate and so the higher the bit depth, the more information can be sent or received per second, therefore the higher the bit-depth the higher the file size. There can be several constraints on what the file size is for audio, a major one being RAM obviously there is a specific amount of RAM on the PS4 and this cannot really be changed and so the developers have to take this into consideration. If it were on PC however this wouldn't be some much of an issue for the developers and more of an issue for the gamers as they would have to up the amount of RAM they have to be able to hold the games data. It also takes more data to output the audio in different ways, for example mono sound is only one channel of sound and so the file sizes wouldn't be as big as if it was outputting as surround sound. PCM is a form of sound that has been decoded from audio sound before it is outputted. It has to be uncompressed and has a high bit-rate and so will be a large file size. Gustavo has a very particular sound so it is easier to identify when Foley has been used in his tracks.


There are several different ways to record the audio, one being multitrack, this is where you record from multiple sources of sound on different tracks or at different times. DAT is a digital audio tape that is used to record digitally on tape at a relatively high level of quality. Its also quite a low cost and so is great for gathering several recording on one device. A sequencer is a piece of software that puts together a from a sequence on MIDI events. MIDI itself allows digital music to communicate with each other, advantages of MIDI are that it is compact meaning that an entire song can be in a couple hundred MIDI messages whereas audio data has to be sampled thousands of times a second. MIDI is also very easy to change, for example the pitch and duration can be edited without having to rerecord. MIDI also only describes the notes that you play meaning you send these notes to almost any instrument thereby creating any sound. The game can also be put onto a blu-ray disk which would allow for HD graphics and surround sound, you can tell it is ready for Blu-Ray because it is already on quite a large platform not on mobile. Doing this improves the quality of the game tenfold, this is especially true for The Last of Us. Its genre fits around this type of sound very well as it complements the environment and game play elements. It adds tension to the game by sending you sounds from different areas for example if there was a noise from the left you would hear it in your left ear and none in your right. Mono sound is where it comes from just one source making it sound very flat and two dimensional, stereo sound is where it comes from multiple sources and surround sound is where the sound will come from whichever direction it should do giving it an almost three dimensional effect and help immerse you in the game.

UNDERSTANDING THE GAMES INDUSTRY - INDUSTRY AND MARKET TRENDS

UNDERSTANDING THE GAMES INDUSTRY - INDUSTRY AND MARKET TRENDS - By Ben Allardyce

This is a report about industry and market trends. Industry trends are the trends of large companies and the software that they develop, whilst on the other hand market trends are the trends the gamers follow, for example what the majority of people want to play right now.

Market Trends

As of 2014  the leading country for games development is the UK, and according to a poll from several games professionals across Europe, the UK also the best source for games 10 years ago. Its strange that the people that are most playing games are over 45 year olds. And oddly the most used format for are applications on a mobile device, this is probably due to how easy and cheap they are to buy most ranging anywhere from free to around £2, with the odd few being more. This has also made the most popular genre puzzle type games often played by older women. Most of the puzzle games are free on an app store. Also according to the IAB the majority of the British gaming community now consists of women. According to Creative Industries in 2014 the amount of people in Britain that were gaming was around 69%, compared to 49% of people in 2011. and women made up around 52% of these people. The reason women and older people have begun to get into games is because they have been made so easily accessible via places like the app/google store. People however can spend too much time gaming, for example children aged 8 - 15 spend an average of 20 hours gaming a week, compared to people aged 16+ that spend an average of 11.

The digital market for games has grown in recent years to a point where physical copies of games are rarely bought. Around 48% of the population in the UK use digital stores to purchase games, 55% purchase mobile apps and 40% still purchase disk copies. The main things that pus the digital market in the UK is when new technology in developed. The UK has a very high end market for smart phones and has around 30 million phones in use, this is one of the major reasons the UK's app stores are the biggest in Europe. The fact that we have so many smartphones also drives the social media market up. Market trends suggest that mobile users send about 50% of the time on their on social media site like Facebook or Twitter. Social media does however boost the use of games due to easy access to other that play the same games. The PC download market is also growing exponentially due to online stores like Steam and Uplay. The UK is currently the best place in Europe to invest in the mobile market, a large part of this is because the UK has the largest network of WiFi hotspots in Europe. Games have to effectively market there products to gamers to draw them in.

Industry Trends

Technology is slowly advancing in video games, and one of the newest developments is the idea of VR. These are devices that let the player immerse themselves on another level of the game. However one of the biggest criticisms is that you can only do it alone. Currently the leading developers are working on social versions of VR. Compared to normal gaming VR is more of a physical experience and more attuned to the Nintendo Wii as it puts your whole body into the game. Augmented reality is where a game puts things into the real world, in a game. An example of this is the game Pokemon Go this game put Pokemon in real life locations that you could go out and find. This was a massive game at the time, however this may not have been due to the AR but the fact that it was Pokemon related. Every couple of years the current edition of consoles get an update, sometimes its just a slimmer version of the previous console however, there can be major updates as well, for example the Xbox One S also supports 4K movies. A recent development,especially in apps, is freemium this is a way the free games that attract thousands of downloads get make money other than ad revenue. Ads actually play a large part of it as one of the main purchases is normally no ads. A lot of games often include in game currency that is available to purchase with real money, the cost of this can range anywhere from £2 - £99, from what I've seen.

In conclusion, the trends of the gaming industry are quite varied. Market trends are what is popular within the community, like genre and console. However the trends of the industry are more focused around the development of new technology and how this impacts upon the market trends.

Design Brief

Design Brief

This is a rogue-like dungeon crawler game sees you play as various characters from the movie Big Trouble in Little China. Your character will constantly shoot in a direction when the corresponding arrow key is pressed, the movement will be set to the WASD keys. There will be 8 different floors, filled with randomly generated rooms, each with a set of enemies in it. These enemies will be increasingly harder as you traverse further though the levels. At the end of each level there will be a boss, there is different option for which boss you will fight and this is randomly picked in the last room. The option for the boss you get will increase in difficulty each floor down. There is an item room on each floor, containing one item, there are hundreds of items that change or modify the weapons and bullets you have.