Advice on how to start designing sound for games?

Question

I'm a university student and im just about to finish my last year of university. There were no parts of my course dedicated sound design for computer games so im am new to this field. I currantly have a pro tools 9 running in my home studio. I was wondering if some of you guy could answer a couple of questions:

What programs would i need to purchase to be able to put sound onto a game? Can anybody give me a few tips or link me to online tutorials? Is there a way i could download a level from a game so i can to be able to test my sounds? Is there a specific genre of game that woud be best to start working on for my first time designing interactive audio?

Answer 1

Hey Michael!

For learning by yourself I suggest you use either Unreal Development Kit or Unity 3D. They're both free and quite easy to get into. When I teach at Stockholm University I let my students replace the sfx in one of the UDK levels. It takes me about four hours to teach them the basics of the User Interface and implementation of audio. This is a great link for UDK:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html

If you look at the ten first videos of "User Interface" and the six "Sounds" videos you're good to go. Just choose any level to mess around with.

I recently launched a site that aims at providing resources for people like you. Incoming shameless self promotion:

http://www.creatingsound.com

I hope you'll find something of interest there. Under "Free Sound Effects" you'll have enough assets to get you started.

When you've passed the first learning stage it's time to take your skills to the test. If you don't know anybody that makes games check the game dev forums. There's always someone looking to hook up with sound designers. Here's a simple rule: If they do it for free, you can do it for free. If they get payed, you get payed. You CAN of course work for free even though they get payed to get the experience but try to avoid it as much as possible.

Good luck!

//Henrik

Answer 2

I dont think there's any specific genre that is suitable for beginners, just do whatever interests you most!

To create sound for games you can use whatever software you want, putting sound into a game depends on the tools the game developer is using. Some game developers use audio middleware, such as Wwise or FMOD, to help implement sound. Middleware is designed to make it easy to prepare sound to be played back in a game, so that sound designers need relatively little help from coders to implement audio.

You should be able to download and teach yourself to use Wwise free - http://www.audiokinetic.com/en/home

There are a ton of tutorial videos - http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11C806BBAAF252CA&feature=plcp

Wwise has a basic FPS game that you can test your own sounds in.

Answer 3

try ModDB or Indie DB for starters finding other people making games you can make sounds for them and have someone else implement them into the games. :) good luck I wanted to do it but now am sticking to film.

ALSO:

check out the books GAME AUDIO TUTORIAL & COMPLETE GUIDE TO GAME AUDIO

Answer 4

What worked for me was finding some people who were learning to make games. Odds are they're just using stock sound files or music, so offer to make some noise for them and they'll fill you in on whatever they need. In short, learn with other people if you can.

After doing some little games this way myself, just handing over mp3s, I'm starting to look in to middleware, but that requires the coders to do some homework too. Besides, focusing on creating and editing good sounds is pretty key, so maybe do that for a bit before you worry about wwise or fmod, etc.

Kind of in the same boat, this is just what's working for me now.

Good luck!

Answer 5

Some good stuff here.

This site has a lot of great stuff too. I was once in the same boat and just started looking around online and on forums like you are here.

Game audio takes a lot but i think you can find all you need to get started online.