Principles of Game Audio and Sound Design: Sound Design and Audio Implementation for Interactive and Immersive Media

The book covers sound design, synthesis, 3D audio localization and implementation techniques for games and virtual reality environments. It covers both the technical but also creative and aesthetic challenges of doing sound for games in the 21st century in a systematic manner. The book gives both students and professionals a strong understanding of the issues specific to game audio and virtual reality, such as 3D audio and localization techniques, adaptive and interactive audio, as well as audio implementation issues using C# and the Unity game engine. Scripting is introduced as a means to deal with the main potential challenges and situations in game audio: Sample selection randomization, sample concatenation, footsteps, collision detection, etc. Sound design is covered both from a practical standpoint (how to create effective sound design), but also from a larger perspective (how to choose the proper sound in the first place, understanding the purpose for each sound in the context of the game). Additionally, the topic of procedural sound design is introduced. This novel approach to sound design relies on creating sound by means of pure synthesis, making it a much more flexible approach. A companion website is offered with extra resources such as fx, scripts, game levels, tutorials, and related links.