The impact of audio in games

Mad Rooster Founding Partners Feridun Emre Dursun and Ercüment Subaşı have talked about the impact of audio in games at Mobidictum Business Network #3
Oyunlarda sesin etkisi
Mad Rooster founding partners

Mad Rooster founding partners Feridun Emre Dursun and Ercüment Subaşı participated in Mobidictum Business Network #3 and talked about the impact of audio in games. Talking about the latest developments in sound technologies and some experiments, the duo answered questions from the audience at the end of the speech.

Mad Rooster has a team of 8 people, including sound designers, programmers, and software developers. The company’s main focus is creating music for games, they also offer services in sound design and editing. Mad Rooster created music and sound for more than 45 games in 2021, having worked on many different genres, from hyper-casual to battle royale, from sports games to pc games. These days, however, the company’s focus is on publishing packages on the Unity Asset Store and Unreal Marketplace.

Experiments

Talking about the sound experiments on the game Amnesia, Ercüment Subaşı shared tables showing the sound effect on the players. Noting the increase in heart rate in the experiments using sound, Subaşı stated that the players are familiar with the games, but they are playing this game for the first time.

“In recent years, most publishers are pushing their developer teams to use audio in their games, and most of the developers are more aware of the affects of proper audio usage. Hence, even if the game is a hyper-casual title, we see specifically tailored audio and music designs for that title.”

Evolution

Stating that video games have had sound technology since their first days, Subaşı mentioned that sound technologies had made great progress since the first days.

“We come to a point where we hear big-budget music productions that record symphony orchestras. You can find the recording sessions of some cool leading games soundtracks on YouTube and have an idea of the production side like Genshin Impact. “

Audio production process

Stating that the stages of sound production are the same almost everywhere globally, Subaşı also talked about the path they follow.

“The production phase varies depending on the services we provide, but two things never change. One, we listen to the game developers to understand the game concept and what they need. Two, we do an internal brainstorming session to define the production plan. For the sound design part, we record various scientific sound sources like fruits and crocodiles.”

Pointing out that these sounds are cleaned and arranged since they cannot be used in that format after recording, Subaşı says that after the process, they started the sound design process on digital workstations such as Logic Pro and Reaper. At this stage, he explains that they layered the sounds by adding various features and then used middlewares such as FMOD.

“Middlewares gives lots of control to the audio team. We can do most of the work completely independent of the game engine and developers. We can build complex systems very quickly with no programming required. We do lots of tests during and after the implementation phase. When everyone is happy, our work is considered done.”

Music production

When it comes to music production, Subaşı states that they did various researches and got to work after sending it for approval.

“For the music production, we research the defined musical style, the musical era, and possible musical instruments that we can use during production. We’ll listen to many examples before we start playing a few notes. And then, we prepare a demo and present it to our team, and if everything sounds okay, we present it to our customer and begin the real production after approval. If it’s adaptive music, we use audio middlewares again to implement and program the music.”

Improvements in audio technology

Touching on the metaverse and spatial sound issues, Dursun talks about the recent developments as follows;

“We hear metaverse everywhere. There will be a huge need for developers trying to build their metaverses, especially spatial audio. I mean 3D audio because that’s how we experience the world. Of course, now we listen to music in stereo or mono formats, but some research shows that the 3D sound experience relaxes people. So we will see some improvements in 3D spatial sound technology and some meta instruments. Nowadays, we are also building one named meta darbuka.”

If you want to find videos about different topics and the whole talk, you can subscribe to the Mobidictum Business Youtube channel. Enjoy watching!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *