Inside The Gallery: Part 7 'Sound Design'

An often overlooked aspect of design, 3D spatial audio contributes immensely to immersion in VR. We talk to award-winning Audio Director Joel Green about his recording and mixing process to bring even the tiny details to life.

Inside The Gallery is a developer diaries series chronicling the development of Cloudhead Games’ The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone. Produced in-house, Inside The Gallery will have sneak peeks, developer interviews, and exclusive footage of Heart of the Emberstone through to release in early 2017.

The Gallery is a multi-award-winning episodic adventure game built from the ground up for virtual reality by Cloudhead Games.

[Vortal_Cord]

Ha, I'll gladly take your job, man. Sound Design has been a dream of mine for years. Endlessly fascinating. Starseed was great in that regard. It's so important in making you feel like you're actually inside that world.

[parallelsmoke]

...I eagerly await each one of these new videos (and of course Ep.2).

[lethalcurrent]

It's really cool to see behind the scenes! Thanks for making 2 amazing games! Ep2 is fantastic.

[soniccrew]

Props to you, Joel Green *claps* This is some amazing work you do :)

[BOLL]

Sound is such a bit part of like... everything. Provides feedback that stuff happens, queues that something outside of line of sight is going on, brings attention from other people, communication, alarms, and then more nice things like music, bird chirping, the breeze in the trees...

Without all of those, the visual part feels very bare, stale, flat, emotionless. Just try to watch a muted movie, it's way harder to get the feel for the atmosphere and mood. Meanwhile audio alone works just fine.

Though, while audio is good for everything at a distance, the visual does help us a great deal with what is right next to us.

Now... I have probably lost any kind of mental thread I had. But yeah, sound, is important. When done well it's transparent, it is just a state of reality, but when missing the world is dead or if it doesn't fit something is very wrong.

Meanwhile with visuals, as long as everything is coherent, same art style and detail density, it looks pretty much fine.

And I'm of course generalizing like mad and spouting nonsense based on my own experiences ;) Anyway, thanks for sharing! Just played through the first episode again the other week, it's quick enough when one knows the puzzles that I can probably play it again when episode 2 comes out :D Nice.