Guest contribution by Martin Roth We've all heard of the promises of procedural game audio. A veritable Valhalla where sounds are created out of thin air, driven by the game engine, eliminating the need for huge sample libraries and tedious recording. Sounds great! So why aren't we hearing more of it in games today? We've all experienced Rockstar's work in GTA 5; those … [Read more...]
Synthesis Tips for the Non-Synthesist
Guest Contribution from Steven Smith Introduction In some ways it seems quite strange to find myself authoring a post on synthesis that has as its main topic: “Not everyone needs to be a synthesist”. But from another angle of practicality, it makes a great deal of sense. Many of us already have found ourselves naturally diving into certain areas of synthesis from within the … [Read more...]
Patch a Day Challenge
Anton Woldhek, whose name you may recognize from the Game Audio Podcast, is a little excited for this month's theme. So excited, in fact, that he wants people to join him in a "patch a day" challenge. I think it's a great idea, though I'm doing a bit too much traveling at the moment to probably get started on it until next week (though I suppose my Pure Data Wavetable … [Read more...]
Synthesis!
As you may have already realized based on yesterday's article post, we've turned over to this month's theme...Synthesis! We have more tools than ever that fall under this heading, and there's been a huge resurgence in modular systems recently. We're not going to focus exclusively on modular, but I chose that image because of how our friend Ivo Ivanov of Glitch Machines has … [Read more...]
100% Synthesized SFX for Stylized Realism in Games
Guest Contribution by Alex May If you were born in the 70’s or 80’s and played video games, you’ll no doubt have fond memories of the early days of game audio when consoles were incapable of playing back more than basic pulse waves or noise. All sounds had to be forged from these primitives, and game SFX were rarely even slightly reminiscent of anything actually real. Now, … [Read more...]