How to Add Sounds to Video Games

We’re back in the sound studio with Greg and David from the Audio Team. After giving us a walkthrough of how Liquid Swords works with sounds and VO, we’re ready to take a closer look at some best practices and how to start working with audio in video games.

Greg: I'd say pack extra for recording sessions outside the studio. Pack extra batteries. Something to sit on. Make some coffee. Make sure you format your SD cards and bring extra memory space so you have enough memory and batteries during your recordings. The first thing you do before you go and have a beer after the session is back up all your recordings to your computer. That applies to anybody. That applies to any type of recording, whether it’s video or audio. Make sure you don't waste everybody's time by accidentally deleting or losing your recording. It’s precious cargo.

David: When it comes to VO recording, you want to be in a controlled environment, preferably a room that has been acoustically treated. Record in an isolated space so you don't get a lot of other sounds from the outside that might disturb you. This gives you a clean signal.

It’s also important to use the right kind of microphones and equipment. There are so many things to think about, but those are just the technical and acoustic aspects. Then, you need to consider the actors you’re recording. They're human beings who need to be creative and get into the mindset that they need to be able to perform. Take the game we’re making at Liquid Swords as an example. We're planning for a lot of actors, and every single one is a unique human being. You need to make the space as comfortable as humanly possible because they usually need to get into pretty uncomfortable emotional places. You need them to feel comfortable and trust that what they’re doing is right. If it’s not, then you try to help them in a way that is as kind as possible. It's always a collaboration. You can't come in as a dictator and just assume that everything will go exactly your way. I really like to lean in the opposite direction. To try to make everything as comfortable as possible for the actors to be able to surprise you. They can bring things you didn't think about, such as the character or the situation, to light. This results in a much better product and situation. You have to think about what you're doing not just from a technical standpoint but also from an emotional one. So don't be a dictator. Be a director.

Greg: You don’t want a room to be silent but controlled. Right now, we’re sitting in a sound studio that is treated acoustically and still not completely dead silent. It's not entirely without reverberation, and we built it in a controlled way. We know there is a sweet spot in the middle of the room where all the speakers are pointed. That is the only place where you can monitor the sounds coming from the speakers.

As audio people, you notice when you play a game or watch a movie with sounds or vocals that have an acoustic mismatch or incorrect reverb to what you’re experiencing. You pick up on the absence of sound, the wrong reverb, a system playing the wrong river, or the sound isn’t clean enough with the wrong acoustic properties embedded in it.

David: An extreme example would be a character standing in a very small bathroom, and it sounds like you're in a church. That kind of thing usually doesn’t go that far, but subtler versions of that are more common.

David: I think gamers today who don’t work directly with audio would realize that there’s a problem.

Greg: Maybe not exactly what the problem is, but they would pick up that something’s off.

David: That's usually the case, the sense that something's off, but you’re not sure what. Before I got into audio engineering, I would probably not have noticed unless someone pointed it out. It's the same thing after having worked with VO for so many years, and I’m so damaged from listening to people speaking that I just immediately hear their mouth-clicking noises and want to remove them. People don't hear it. People don't care. But I do. Oh! I just heard one! I did it myself!

Greg: We try to capture the purest sounds possible. Sounds that are the purest in the context we want to have them so we can play them back in as many different situations as possible. So if we work with footsteps, for example, we try to capture very clean footsteps so we can use them on the street, in both a small alley and a tunnel, a church, an apartment, on a carpet. To achieve this, we're creating an acoustic system that maps the game's visuals so we can play any pure sound that will be colored by its environment.

Greg: We use a foley stage and professional foley artists to record footsteps, for example. A foley artist is anyone who works with recording footsteps or clothes. Any sounds that would generate from a character’s movements. Maybe you've seen videos of foley artists working with movies. They’re in these big sound stages with random props around them and microphones, creating the sound at the same time as the movie plays in the background.

David: Most of us started as gamers. I was a gamer and a musician. I started with music, and then I got into audio engineering. But then, how do you get into games?

Greg: Everything is readily available now. You can get Unity or Unreal Engine for free. Download and play around with them. Find people and make your own game. Many of the junior profiles we see are people who have yet to have the opportunity to work with other studios. They tend to send showreels with only sound redesigns, which is when they take a trailer, trash the sound, and replace it with their own. That's a good way to demonstrate design skills.

David: You can definitely get a job at a game studio by applying to a job ad. That's how I got this job. But it’s equally important to network, even if you find it difficult. There are networking get-togethers and events everywhere, especially here in Stockholm. This city has turned into a developer hub. Going to events and connecting and making friends will maybe not immediately lead to a job offer, but after some time, you’ll be able to seize those opportunities down the line. That will most likely get you to a place where you can work with things you want.

Greg: Video game development is a collaborative experience. You can teach someone sound design, but it’s harder to teach social skills, so we consider that to be equally important. Even in our bubble, as sound designers, we work with every other department in the studio. We put sound on animations, 3D models, character models, and vehicles. Everything in the game has sound, and there’s a different way to implement it. We need to have a common language with all of these departments. We need to know how the animation pipeline works. We need to know how the art department is making a room or building and how they work with the outdoors. All of that is equally important as knowing how to create a sound in our software.

David: The industry and technology develop so quickly. It’s important to keep up with the most used tools, especially in big-budget projects. Try to find ways to learn online; it's a good way to get ahead and understand the field. Wwise has made a lot of really good educational content available, and there are a lot of courses online that you can access for free. That's how I learned. Even if it’s just something you want to do because you’ve watched videos of foley artists, they’re a lot of fun! But for us, that’s less than 1% of our jobs. It's a lot more collaboration, working and communicating with other people, and figuring out how to make stuff work in our engine and middleware.

Greg: And finally, if you interview for a studio, you need to have played the latest game that the studio has released.

David: Or, at the very least, watched a YouTube gameplay stream!

Thank you, Greg and David, for your tips on how to start working with video game audio!

Read more about how Liquid Swords works with audio, or check out all our open positions on our Careers page.