Win an iPhone FMOD License + Using Sound Design To Enhance Your Game

FMOD has been nice enough to give away one license to an indie developer for either indie or iPhone audio development. To see who gets the license, we’re holding another contest…post why you need an FMOD audio license…like what game will it be used for…and the indie/team most likely to release a compelling game the soonest wins it.

Now…onto the podcast…

Ben, from Firelight Technologies, discusses the importance of audio in games.

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-ben-fmod-interview-final.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ben: Hi, my name is Ben Batt. I work for Firelight Technologies in Melbourne, Australia. I work on the FMOD music and sound effects engine.

Interviewer: What’s FMOD about?

Ben: FMOD is an engine that allows you to play back interactive music and sound effects. It’s cross platform so it makes it much easier. You can use the same code on all those platforms that you’re targeting. It has a very high performance DSP engine so you can play lots of sound effects at once without using too much CPU. You can add all kinds of run time, DSP effects, low passes, high passes, reverbs and inverts.

We also have a sound designer tool so you can add interactive behavior to your sound effects. The aim of that is to put as much control over the sound effects in the hands of the sound designer as possible so they don’t have to go through the programming for every little tweak that they need to do.

Interviewer: You know, for a lot of developers, game developers, indie game developers, they think sound is the last thing that they put in. How important is sound? What have you seen or what impact have you seen the use of the FMOD engine or sound, in general, to enhance game play or enhance the game experience?

Ben: Yeah, well, I say it’s hugely important. You can play any game with the sound muted. It’s so much less a compelling experience, like, I mean, firing a machine gun at the bad guys. If you can’t hear it firing, it’s a little bit of a flat experience. So, it adds usually to the emersion in the game, yet if your game has cool sound it’s much more enjoyable to play.

Interviewer: What about casual games though where they don’t necessarily need to hear the depth of bullets being shot and where it’s being shot and where it’s coming from? How can casual games benefit from the high quality of sound that you guys can bring to the system?

Ben: Well, I tell you, it’s still important. You don’t need to be as realistic about it, but it still adds a whole lot to the experience. I mean, Peggle is a good example.

Interviewer: Peggle is the pop cap game, right?

Ben: Peggle, the pop cap game. You are shooting balls at pegs and watching them bounce around and stuff. So, it’s a nice, little satisfying pop sound when you shoot the ball. You can hear it bouncing off each peg, and when you finish the level you get this triumphant “Ode to Joy” music. So, it’s candy for your ear, I guess you might say. It makes a lot of the experience more fun.

Interviewer: You know, you mentioned that there’s a sound designing tool. What exactly is that? You said that it allows a sound designer to do more stuff without the help of the programmer. What exactly are you referring to?

Ben: OK, so the usual work for our sound designer tool is you create sound effects in something that’s virtual, Sound Forge or your work station, your editor of choice, and then you bring it into our tool and you add real time effects and that sort of thing.

So, a simple example is you might want your sounds to be muffled as they get further away, like the high frequency fall-off. So, you can add a low pass filter that depends on a distance parameter, and as it gets further away you lower the cut-off of the low pass filter.

Or you can do things like randomization as well if you’re playing footstep sounds, for instance, or just like ball hitting peg sounds. You don’t want to play exactly the same one every time because that gets a bit tiring on the ears. People are very good at picking up repetition in sounds. So you might just randomize it between, say, four different samples. It adds a bit more… It makes it a bit more interesting audio experience.

Interviewer: Does your tool generate the code for that within the FMOD system or how does that work? So, once the sound designer comes in, adds the sound, changes that they want, what does your tool do after that to make sure or allow it to be put into the game?

Ben: The process is basically, yeah, you create your sound effects in a tool. You can audition them there, tweak them and have them sound the way you want, and then you just build it to a binary format and then our run time engine loads. So, the program tells the engine to load the particular binary file, and then they can grab events from that file and say, “Play this event” or, I don’t know, “Set this parameter to such-and-such a value based on the game state”. And it will make the sound behave appropriately.

Interviewer: Yeah, you know you bring up a good point. If users get used to a sound or a certain pattern in the game, they may even get bored at the game. So, how can game developers use sound or modify the sound so it feels random even though it may be the same sound effect, stuff like that? Your engine actually seems to be able to provide it.

Ben: There are a few different possibilities. You can make variations of the same sound effect so I guess use, maybe, slightly different explosion sounds, or you could even use the same sounds and just shuffle them around a bit on the time line and mix them together, that sort of thing.

So, you can randomly select between those different samples. You can also do, just like you can use the same sample and use several pitch variations or volume variations that also adds a bit more interesting texture to the sound. Yeah, things like that, even just randomizing them in time so you can play exactly the same sample and just respawn it at varying time intervals.

Interviewer: So, do some of the game studios that use your system, do they do that with their sound design? Do they try to make it random? Is that even important for game design to make the sound a little different each time or not every time but even just randomizing it throughout the different levels and stuff like that?

Ben: Yeah, I think that’s very important. An example of someone a while ago, he was playing some game and swinging his crowbar or whatever it was on various surfaces, so he’d be inside and hit a metal wall and it goes clank. Then he goes outside and hits a tree and it still goes clank. That’s not the sound it should make, so even just varying on that sort of level is important but also if you’re just constantly doing the same action getting exactly the same sound every time, you are going to get very tired of it.

Interviewer: Are there any other surprises or things that game designers and small developers should think about in terms of sound that either FMOD provides or just has been surprising because, you know, just even talking to you now you brought up a lot of issues that a lot of indie developers don’t think about which is just a variation in sound effects and just varying or randomizing sound effects? Is there anything else that’s important?

Ben: Right. I’m not sure that I can think of specific indie surprises. I guess just making sure the quality of your sound is appropriate for the device that you are working for. The iPhone, for example, it’s got pretty good sound, but it’s not like a full 5.1 surround system so you can save resources and that sort of thing by reducing the quality of sounds that will still be fine on the iPhone because it’s just a slightly lower quality system.

Interviewer: With that said, you guys have an iPhone sound kit. Can you talk more about that and how it’s used?

Ben: That’s right, we do have an iPhone implementation. That’s basically the same sound designer tool as you use for all of the other platforms. It’s pretty high performance. I’ve heard that it’s about 32 channels, uses about 10 percent of the CPU which is pretty good on the iPhone. It’s a pretty small CPU, and basically we’ve got most of the features. Well, it’s got all of the features that it has on the other platforms. It’s just that you need to be, maybe, a little more careful about which effects you use and that sort of thing because some effects use the CPU.

For example, there’s a pitch shifter effect which is very expensive. It has a CPU. A few people are using that on their iPhone, but your game can only do a little pitch shifter and a little bit of random. It’s a trade-off. You need to figure out what your priorities are.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the games that have used it or even in a game that’s used your system for the iPhone?

Ben: Yeah, one game that I know of that I find it people are using to play music and so forth… I think they’ve been pretty happy with it just from the emails that I’ve seen.

Interviewer: Do you guys look into using sound or audio for game play itself, or are you mainly focused or are you seeing mostly FMOD being used for sound effects and for the background music because I know there have been some smaller games that have actually used audio game play where you have to piece the music together and stuff like that. I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve seen first hand.

Ben: Yeah, I guess there are a few examples of that. Guitar Hero is an obvious example. They us FMOD and it’s a very sound versed game. I guess the game play itself is more of a visual matching thing, but still the sound feedback is very important.

I can’t think of any specific other commercial released games. One of the people that works with us developed like a completely audio game where basically you would just never get anything by listening. It was an iPhone game. You basically never get it by listening to the sounds and the position of the sounds as you turn around and that sort of thing.

Interviewer: OK, so let’s talk about pricing. You know, you have triple A titles using this system, so is this even affordable for indie game developers?

Interviewee: Yeah, well, in addition to our commercial licenses, they’re 6,000 US per title per platform. We’ve also got an iPhone license, 500 US per title. There’s also like a shareware hobbyist license which is 100 US. That’s basically for games that are distributed just on the web where you don’t have any expectation of high sales. You just make a very small amount of money. Basically, that exists on a case by case basis. So, you need to contact us to see whether you’re eligible for that.

Interviewer: OK and you have a student license, too, right? For indie projects?

Interviewee: Yes, absolutely. It’s completely free for non-commercial users, so if you just want to download it, try it out and use it in an indie project, you are quite welcome. You can just go to our website.

Interviewer: And what’s the website?

Interviewee: The website is www.fmod.org. That’s f-m-o-d.org. Yeah, you’ll find all the information on there. There are forums and stuff on there as well which can be useful if you’re trying to figure out how to do certain things.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.