Cross Platform Design

This instalment is going to delve into what differences and similarities exist when you make audio for the PC, or console, or handheld. Gamasutra has an interview article entited Planet of Sound: Talking Art, Noise, and Games with EA's Robi Kauker. I will be using this article as my base of research. 

Robi Kauker is the audio director for the EA Play Label at Electronic Arts and for almost ten years he's been helping create the multilayered soundscapes that make up the Sims world.

Robi Kauker has a wide variety of games he has worked on. He mentions that although they go across platforms there is a suprising amount of similarities between all the projects. The aspect of when this happens this sound is played and so on are exactly the same. The major difference he points out is the variety of sound and quality.

And in The Sims 3 world, it might be a two-second, three-second, four-second bird call or bird song to build the ambience. In the DS, it's a tenth of a second and I have to create the birdcall through programmatic, data-driven stuff, not just preset samples. In the certain way, the DS titles are probably going to have more interesting ambience -- at least for the geeky.

When developing a game for the DS your sound will never be heard in 5.1 surround sound. There are two miniture speakers that the player will hear the sound out of. Kauker mentioned that he had a DS game where he was alloted 512K for audio, including music. He said that the process of creating the sound for that game was exactly the same as any other. This shows that although there are drastic differences in the technology used, the basic principals remain the same. It is more important to understand the underlaying factors of audio design rather than to just simply know the equipment.

Althouth this video is about the sims on the whole, you can hear some of the sounds and music that he has created for the game.