Audio
You make everything the game is heard through: effects, music, ambience, voice.
Read these, in this order
| Why | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Audio Workflow | Formats, loudness targets, mono vs stereo, length limits. Short page, and every part of it matters. |
| 2 | Naming Conventions > Audio Clips | The five categories, and where the action and variation tokens go. |
| 3 | Project Folder Structure | Particularly the Raw / Source / Exported split. Raw recordings are not in version control. |
| 4 | Q-Dex | Where field recordings and anything purchased actually live. |
Your tools
- Audacity for recording and cleanup
- Q-Dex for raw recordings, libraries, anything you want to find again by searching
- Gitea & Git LFS for the finished clips that go in the project
Your first task
Add a Sound: one effect, from recording to playing in the game.
What actually goes wrong
Stereo on a positional sound. Anything with a position in the world has to be mono. Unity cannot
pan a stereo clip to a point in space, so a stereo footstep plays flatly in both ears no matter where
the character is. Music and ambience stay stereo, since they aren't coming from any one place.
Mixing by ear across a session. It drifts, every time. Mix to the integrated loudness target
instead. → Audio Workflow > Loudness
A one-shot over the length limit. It is almost always either a loop that wasn't marked as one,
or several sounds that want to be separate clips.
Raw recordings in version control. /Assets/Raw is not synced. Field recordings go to Q-Dex
so they are searchable, and large media to Bubbly Backup. What goes in the project is the
finished clip.
Forgetting the variation number. A randomised pool is AU_SFX_Wpn_Shotgun_01_Fire_01,
…_Fire_02, and so on. The action goes after the number, the variation after that.