Sound in games

Sound is one of a game aspects that has the biggest influence on how the game is received. It creates mood and helps the player to better understand the situation he is in. For example, when you play any RPG game and you're in danger, surrounded by deadly monsters the music you will hear is going to be different from what you would hear while safely resting in a tavern, drinking beer in front of a fireplace. 

Speaking of which, here's an anecdote from my life: Baldur's Gate 2 is my all time favourite game and from time to time I feel a strong urge to install it again and play it for at least few hours. So it happened about a month ago. Unfortunately, due to massive uni workload related to the group project, I had no time to spare at all. So, I decided to at least listen to the soundtrack while I was working on the project. And I did. About seven times, whole 53minutes from beginning to the end. It's just so good! It recalled many great memories and made my work more enjoyable. 

I guess it shows how important part of game is music. And it doesn't have to be sublime, orchestral music like in Baldur's Gate. Actually, I think that simple 8/16 bit music in older games was catchier and more memorable. I bet that when you look at each of these tree pictures below you have different melody in your head :)

 

 

But music is only one part of sounds used in every game. There are also weapon sounds, environment sounds, vehicle sounds etc. 

I remember that as a 9 year old I played the original Half-Life a lot. I know I shouldn't have, but I guess it had a big impact on my imagination. And come on, it wasn't much worse from Alien movie that I watch as a 8 year old. Anyway, about 10 years  later a friend of mine introduced me to Team Fortress 2. I instantly recognized the switching weapon sound as the one that was also used in Half-Life! It was not important, half a second long sound but I wouldn't mistaken it with anything else!

 Coming back to Team Fortress 2, there's another type of sound in games worth mentioning: characters sound. Medic without his German accent wouldn't be the same character, just like Pyro would be completely different without his 'MMPH!'. Voices are the quality that makes those characters so funny and unique. 

Can you imagine GLADOS from Portal game without her voice? If you mute her she is just few robotic balls and wires hanging down from the ceiling!

I just realized that most of the games I mentioned above (Half-Life, TF2, Portal) were developed by the same studio - Valve, so I guess that means they pay attention to sound in their games. My Favourite score music also comes from Portal:

 I hope that this entry helps to show the importance of sound in video games.        

Game Engines

So game engines... The subject that I don't have too much to say about. Obviously as a part of this course I had the opportunity to work a bit with UDK and Cryengine but unfortunately my experience covers only importing and placing assets. I'll have to work on it over the summer, so I won't waste time on learning the engine basics in the third year. So due to my lack of first-hand knowledge I did a bit of a research and in this post I'll not relate to my own experience too much, but I'll rather rely on information I found on the internet. I'll focus on three leading game engines (UDK, Cryengine and Unity) and  talk a bit about their history and in which games they were used.

But first a few words about game engines in general. What is a game engine? It's a virtual place where game developers put their individual works so they compose into the whole - game. It includes all assets, textures, music, animations, UI, scripts etc. So in a way game engine is like a glue that holds all these elements together. Some companies use already existing engines whereas others create new engines for their games specifically. 

The first engine that I'll talk about is called Unreal Engine. It was developed by American game developed Epic Games and first used in 1998 in game called (surprise, surprise) Unreal. It's core has been written in C++ so it can be used on many different platforms including Windows, iOS, Mac, Xbox and Playstation. That may be one of the main reasons why it's so eagerly used by many game developers. It's been usually used for FPP, MMORPG and RPG games such as Gears of War, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Borderlands, Deus Ex to name just a few. 

 

As I mentioned before I had the opportunity to work with Unreal Development Kit, but unfortunately we haven't become friends. In my opinion it has really ugly and vague interface and when I wanted to explore it, it kept crushing. It happened so many times that now I'm literary afraid to click anything in it.

 

Anyway, the next engine that I also worked with was CryEngine. It was designed by German game developer Crytek, the first game it was used in was Far Cry and it's probably mostly known from Crysis series (cry, cry, cry!). Games created in CryEngine look visually stunning, the lighting is just amazing and outdoor environments look realistic. I have to admit that so far my work with this engine was problem-less, the interface is user friendly and it only crashed twice (well, nobody's perfect).

The last engine that I'll talk about is Unity. Although I never worked with it I have heard quite a lot about it so I decided to mention it as well. It's a quite young engine (2005) by Unity Technologies, that is mostly used by independent and mobile games. I guess that one of the biggest pros of this engine is that it allows in-browser gaming with minimal downloads required.

Obviously these are only few of the existing game engines, all of them have pros and cons, but it's interesting to see how they vary and what they are capable of.    

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity 

Documentation

Documentation. My worst enemy. I've been struggling with it since the first year. I've never got into the habit of writing my design documents along the way of creating actual assets, so I usually have to do it the night before hand-in... And it's really hard to recall and properly describe a month's worth of work in one night.

Although, even that I hate it so much I understand the importance of documentation and why we've been doing it as a part of our course. It's essential in process of game creation. If company hires hundreds of workers it's easy to lose track of who is doing what and whether they are doing it correctly -  so here's where design document comes in handy. 

Here I'm going to make up a game as a practice for my Final Major Project for my third year. Actually it's going to be based on a game that I played as a kid, but I can't recall its title now. I've never been a fan of racing games but I really enjoyed that particular one and I wish someone would do a remake of it.  

Audience: 15+

Genre: sport/racing

Platform: Xbox 360/ PS3

Overview: 

Futuristic, slightly cartoony (similar to Borderlands) hover-board racing game. The main character is a teenager who built his/her own hover-board from scratch and takes part in illegal, amateur midnight races (tutorial part of the game). He/she is really good so he/she gets a chance to take a part in real tournament (main part of the game). The competition is dirty and dangerous, there's only one rule - whoever is the first on the finish line wins the race. The hover-boards are highly customisable and there're also many weapons to be used. 

Lead Character:

customisable, player can chose gender and face characteristics, but it's always a teenager from a lower class family (to support the story)

Outfits and hairstyles can be changed and tattoos and accessories can be added along the way between the stages of tournament. These additions can be purchased for points that player earn by winning races.

 About 8,000 tris

 

 NPC:

Varity of opponents from different social classes (can be distinguished by outfits and hover-boards advance level)

different kinds of enemies with different race styles:

• Tall, slim enemies that prioritize speed
• Big and heavy enemies that trying to knock the player down
• Small enemies that mainly use weapons and traps to eliminate others.

5,000-6,000 tris each

Vehicles:

hover-boards reflect personalities and race styles of their owners.

Player can customise their own by spending points gained on winning races.

Environments:

tutorial part of the game: futuristic but dirty slums areas

main part of the game: variety of racing tracks. Some wild and rough environments like deserts, ice fields, jungles as well as futuristic, technologically advanced racing arenas with holographic billboards and screens.

Many ramps and shortcuts to be discovered by player. 

Props:

Plenty of weapons to choose from like bombs, rockets and traps like force fields.

     

Level design

The subject of this post is level design and in fact I'm quite happy that I'm writing it now instead of in the first term as I was supposed to do. It may sound strange, but the reason behind that is quite simple: in the second term I had the opportunity to work on a group project that was to design and create a game level. Therefore now I've got some experience to which I can relate in this post. So below I'll describe some stages that we went through, things that we had to consider and problems that have occurred along the way of creation of this level.  

The brief was to create a gothic-themed level, so the first (and as I've already said in one of the previous posts - one of the most important) step was research. We wanted to make sure that whatever we would create could be easily recognized as gothic related. Beside of historical and architectural aspects, we looked for examples of gothic themes in literature, film and other video games. After considering different types of gothic environments we could create, we decided to go with manor house. 

Having decided on that we could start doing some initial concepts. Below you can see some created by me.

 

We all agreed that one of the level aspects we wanted to emphasize was mood. So even though we didn't have final concepts ready we were playing with lighting and weather effects like rain and fog in cryengine.   

Just like it would be done in production of real game level we started 3d work with simple level block-out in engine. We decided to build our manor with modular pieces so creating this block-out helped us to estimate how big the pieces needed to be. It  also helped us to decide on overall size of the level and placement of specific elements. I believe that this was the most important step level design-wise as here we decided what path we wanted the player to walk through. This decision has big impact on playability of our level.

Although, at this step, one of the biggest problems we encountered during the production have occurred. We had pretty hard time trying to match what we had planned in our minds for the interior and for the exterior of the building. The interior simply didn't fit inside the exterior's shell. So we had to rearrange some things. Each one of us drew his idea for how we could fix that. This is my sketch:

After we had whole level planned out we could start working on proper assets to swap with placeholder blocks. At this stage we only had to make sure that the level looked nice as all level-design problems were already sorted. Here's some examples of assets created by me:

And here you can see our level fly-through. It's not completely finished yet, we still need to create some more assets to populate it but I guess it's finished enough to show it. Enjoy :)