True Immersion Comes From Sound. Not Visuals. Change My Mind

Ever played a game where something seems off, but you can’t quite figure out why? Or when everything looks fantastic, but something feels missing? 99% of the time that something is SOUND.

There’s a quote that my old Music Production teacher Mr. Zane Zalis from High School told me once. He said, “All you Actor’s may be the King’s of the screen, but we… are the Kingmakers!”

Sound is one of those things that you only notice when it’s done poorly. Good sound design and music will completely immerse and you’ll never even know how or why. If you want to know what I mean, then the next time you play one of your favourite games, then try turning off either the Sound Effects, the Music or both and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

There are many techniques when it comes to sound, but I imagine that if you’ve been following this blog, then you’ll be coming from a programming background. So, here’s my favourite trick to apply to frequent Sound Effects so that they don’t become too repetitive. If you play a Sound a lot and it sounds exactly the same each time then people are going to notice and wonder why something sounds odd.

Here’s the one line of code you’ll need to make your Unity game just a little more immersive:

All this does is randomize the pitch of an AudioSource just a little bit so that it doesn’t sound exactly the same each time. This is very useful for things like footsteps or gunshots. Sounds that will be played very frequently with very little time in between. This will keep your game from sounding stale and boring. You’ll hear what I mean ^_^b