InVivo's Audio Management Systems

The sound design in horror games plays a crucial part to the player's experience. Besides the visuals, audio is what makes the environment come to life.

At InVivo there are two sound categories which are distinguished, based on their functionality: ambience and all the various sound effects (SFX).

Ambience are all the environmental sounds, like the computer's screen buzzing, flickering lights, gas steams etc... that a player expects to hear inside an abandoned hospital, thus, creating an overall spooky feeling and immersing the player into the game.

The remaining SFX can be heard, when an action happens. These SFX include player footsteps, panel button sounds, padlock wheel rotations etc...

Since there are many SFX that are triggered in our game we had to come up with a solution to reuse audio game elements, instead of creating and destroying game objects at will. Using a technique called Object Pooling we created a bunch of sound game objects and used them when it's appropriate. Imagine having a bag of items, where you get an item when you need it, and you put it bag after use. Thus we avoid the constant creation and destruction of audio elements, which can have an overall performance increase.

Until next time...