Area Loops

Ambient and Procedural Sound Design

Area Loops are some of the fundamental sounds that go into sound design for games. In the example that I’ve been given we are looking at a map where there is a small town, with some water nearby, a meadow, and some other terrain further out.

I started with implementing a wind sound throughout the village area. It was easy enough to drag and drop, then I needed to add sound attenuation. This way there wouldn’t be sound bleed from the town into other areas of the map. I created a sound attenuation for the wind noise and kept the shape of the area loop as a sphere. The town is a pretty simple shape so the sphere worked well for this! I adjusted the internal radius, which would have the main wind sound playing throughout and then I adjusted the falloff distance. This is when the player would be walking out of the town, where the wind noise would start fading away.

Attenuation shapes also play an important role! There are spheres, boxes, capsules, and cone shapes to represent and illustrate various sounds for any given map or terrain! The cone shape illustrates a more directionally pointed sound. The box is great for buildings! The use of spatialization definitely depends on the situation or the terrain that a player is sitting in. Often times ambient loops might be too distracting if we leave spatialization on.

I also learned how to use sound cues within the context of area loops! There may be times where an area loop can feel too repetitive of artificial, which is where we would use sound cues. We can add different layers of sound to create a more interesting an realistic area loop. Depending on the context of the game and how long a player would be in this area, it’s up to individual discretion on how much detail and how many layers we would want to add within a given area.