Ambient sounds

[GarageGothic]

I wonder why so few amateur games make use of ambient sounds. It seems that to most of us, sound just means incidental sound effects, when opening a door, firing a gun or breaking a window. The silence in between is covered up with music.
It can't be because of file size. A good quality looping ambient sound can be made at around 100 or 200k, and often they can be used in multiple locations (traffic noise, birds singing etc.). Is it because they get too repetitive (as if midi music doesn't!), or are they too difficult to record?

I got really into ambients while working on maps for first person shooters. They create so much atmosphere when used properly, and help to define the room. Try standing in an empty room, close your eyes and just listen, you'll hear so much more than silence. And that was just an empty room. Imagine a train station, or a park, or a busy office. How come we often just worry about the visuals when sound is so effective?

I'm even considering the possibility of scrapping music altogether (maybe except for a title and end credits tune) and just have ambient sounds in my game, letting the background noise be the score, as David Lynch often does in his films. It'll take some work recording it and mixing it just right, but I'll think it'll be worth it.

[Ghormak]

Ah, one who thinks like me. If I ever really get going on my game, you can bet I'll be relying on sound a lot to improve the atmosphere.

Mixing background noise with music is also something I've been planning to try. I love when that's done well.

[m0ds]

The problem is that you can have too much ambient sound or too little, too much music or two little. The only adventure game I've ever seen balance the two brilliantly is LBAII.

The music isn't constant but kicks in every so often, and the ambient sound effects of the sea, rain etc never get tiring.

Point and clicks have a tendancy of having music playing throughout. Although I do like this, I do see the point that it can get irratating. But a game with just ambient sounds will also bug people.

KI has music playing all the time, but also has sounds like waves etc looping when you're at the beach and stuff.

My only gripe is that if you're doing ambient sound effects (basically, you seemed to be talking about atmos sounds) then the rest of the game has to be consistent with its sounds to work. A game that has SFX but no speech pack IMO is a bit of a cop out (altho I admit I am committing this offence with both FoY and KI) so if you go for constant background sound effects, you've got to live up to my expecations at least and put SFX all over.

Last year sometime I played with cutting music in every so often rather than having it play throughout and it worked nicely, it just meant a hell of a lot of extra coding (but nothing out of reach).

Ambience does work in some games, like FPS' but I don't think it really compliments a point and click so much, because its very static. Yes, its nice, but its not going to change everything.

Nice idea tho, good luck. Video killed the radio star.

m0ds

[EldKatt]

To my experience few amateur games make use of really good music as well. I think the point might be that not everyone realizes that ambient sound (and indeed music) does very much to a game's atmosphere. I see tons of people requesting (graphical) artists (background artists, sprite artists, animators...) and coders, but very very rarely requests for composers or sound artists. A game needs graphics and code to exist, while music and sound can be ignored without the game being 'incomplete' as such (although it will be much more incomplete than it would be otherwise), and therefore a lot of people simply don't think about it.

[MillsJROSS]

Back when I first joined the community, none of the games would play music on my system, which would piss me off. I can't play a game without sound...you don't notice it until it there is none. So once I got a new system, and realised that these games did have sound, it made me a happier person. Now whether a person prefers music or ambience throughout their game, is their oppinion. But m0ds is porbably right, a mix of both in the right direction can be very effective.

-MillsJROSS