What 2D game developers fear about surround sound, and why you should do it anyway
By: Panos Kouvelis
Tags: Game Development, Surround Sound, Games, Game Audio, Sound Design

Summary: New developments in video game authoring frameworks and tools allow easy implementation of immersive audio formats, like surround. Low prices and new technologies allow the players to equip their gaming setups with adequate quality 5.1 to 7.1 speakers. Yet, 2D game developers often ignore the quality that surround sound can bring to their games. We believe that this happens because of casual unawareness from the side of the developer, and we propose a universal framework on how to implement surround sound for your 2D video games, in a way that will translate perfectly in any speaker configuration.

What 2D game developers fear

In 2D game development it’s common practice not to use surround sound. In this article I will try to explain why this happens as opposed to the film industry which uses it with success, why anybody should try it and also share some solid guidelines on how to do it the right way. So, if you are a game developer and you have second thoughts, or you never really thought about it, now is the perfect time to create your game featuring surround sound. Apart from making your game far more exciting for the players, it can really help separate your game from the rest of the competition.

Let’s take it from the start.

For years now, both in game development forums online and discussions that I had with many game developers in person, it really impressed me that they all fear surround sound. I know “fear” is a powerful word but I use it because they really express fear.

What they feel is fear of the unknown, and not because they don’t understand the technology or they don’t have a good idea how their game should play sound. Their decision not to “go there” with their game, is a logical one, it’s a production decision, where experienced people with good logic decide not to include this feature in their final product.

The problem is that more channels surely offer more immersion, but as we know from engineering, more features means also more issues, problems or ways for things to go wrong. It’s a know philosophy in computer programming, that by adding 1 feature in your program, you introduce 2 bugs. Funny and true.

The common 7.1 surround setup

Before we continue I think it’s a good idea to first define, which is the common surround setup that we are going to base our logic upon for the rest of this article.

I choose the 7.1 surround setup (see picture below), as this is what is most commonly offered by sound card outputs and also from that format, we can easily derive the lesser ones.

For this setup, we use 7 speakers, usually all full-range, and one sub-woofer that plays back the low frequency effects and sometimes the low end frequencies of music.

The first speakers are the front left and right, followed by one in the center. Those 3 are located in front of the player. Then 2 surround satellites are located in the back and 2 more on the sides of the player, making up 4 satellites for the extra surround content. Finally, there is the sub-woofer that carries the low frequencies.

At the last part of the article series, I give specific instructions on what each speaker should play, but first we must define the common problems that come with using surround in your 2D games, defining the fears of any developer in a concrete way.