Three Ways Sound Design can Improve your Games

Hello all,

I’m @Mithrandir6440, an aspiring sound designer and web developer. In this tutorial I’m going to go over the benefits of adding quality sound design to your game.

I’ll be honest - my favorite games all have great sound design. I appreciate good graphics, game design, ect, but there’s just something about a game that has really good, quality sound design that sucks me in and never makes me want to leave.

To make my point, I’m going to go over three games that have immaculate sound design.

Game 1: Vesteria
Cost: Free to Play
Out of all of the games I’m going to mention, Vesteria is probably the best of the bunch. It doesn’t even sound like Roblox. Every aspect of the game, every ability, NPC, and location has incredible, custom sound design.

To start off, all of the locations in the game have incredible soundtracks. From Tropical Beaches to Snowy Strongholds to Mystic Forests, each soundtrack for each and every area really ups the ambience and fun. For example, there’s this place in the game named Port Fidelo, which is basically a large tropical port, as well as home to the hunter faction in the game.

The Developers could have just left it to beautiful graphics to tell the story for them, but no, they added a custom soundtrack into the back to make it sound even more awesome. Apart from sounding awesome though, it really tells the story of what’s going on there. It starts out light and pleasant - Port Fidelo is a tropical harbor after all, and the hunters that live there are “free-spirited.” But after a few measures, the music begins to take on a slightly mystic and more royal theme - still keeping up with the cheerful percussion, which points towards the noble hunters that live there - and also suggests that there’s slightly more than meets the eye here.

I think the lesson we can learn from this is that sound design can tell a story.

Game 2: Break In
Cost: Free to Play
When I was younger, I really liked playing this game. It’s fun on a lot of fronts - good lighting, great story, and the usual fun of hiding in the closet from the evil magician :slightly_smiling_face: :mage:. But now that I look back on it, I think the sound design was what really pulled everything together.

It has an incredibly iconic theme song, that I could still hum even after I had moved on from the game. Plus, @Cracky4 added a lot of fun sounds, such as creaks in the floorboards, creepy ambience in the sewers, the fun pizza guy theme (which I can still hum, thank you), etc…

Break in shows that sound design can pull your audience in, give them lasting memories, and make your game an icon. Technically three things. I know.

Game 3: Energy Assault

There are a lot of things to like about this FPS, but I’ll just head right to the awesome sound design this game implements.

Each of the guns have their own sounds of course, but I love the complexity that the game developers implemented here. Bullets will make different sounds depending on what material they hit, which is great feedback about where you’re shooting. They also have this cool thing where bullets that pass within a certain radius of you will whistle slightly, which lets you know if someone’s shooting at you and you need to get down. There’s also an extremely satisfying sound that plays when you tag someone.

I think the lesson to learn from this is that sound design can provide great feedback to the user. The kill sound lets you know if you killed someone, which is surprisingly helpful. And I can’t tell you how many times my killstreak has been saved by the whistling sound :slightly_smiling_face:.


Anyways, that wraps it up for this tutorial. If you have anything you’d like to add or share, feel free to! Hopefully you’ll have a better understanding of why sound design is so important.

Until next time, happy building :slight_smile:.

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Another great example of a game that uses sound design to its advantage is Rogue Lineage.

Even though the graphics are less than perfect, I think the clever sound design of the game covers up for that.

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Nice post! I have played Vesteria before and yes they have done an excellent job with their sound!

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