Sound has been an integral part of video games since their inception, constantly cuing players to their virtual actions and surroundings and providing emotional guidance with music. As with graphics capabilities, processing power, and media storage, audio technology has advanced at an astonishing rate, in part due to the expansion and desires of the gaming world. Today, it is now possible to enhance a player’s aural experience to the point of complete immersion.

Among the primary concerns of game audio developers is the ratio of game play hours to the total hours of audio and music. With the extremely large amount of time a person will spend playing a single game, and the nature of sample-based game audio and music, repetition becomes a major obstacle blocking game enjoyment.

This paper is a study of game audio and music development techniques aimed atplayer/game interactivity, realistic sound environment implementation, and removing the repetitive nature of game sound and music. Examples of implementation are taken from the sound design and music – created by myself – for the game Orange – created by Joey Silayan. Orange was developed using the development environment Virtools Dev 3.0 and the 3D modeling software Maya.

The introduction and Part I provide a brief game audio background and knowledge base as well as sound design implementation techniques for the reduction of repetition in game audio – focusing on Orange audio implementation.

Part II of this paper describes, in detail, the Virtools implementation of a simple acoustic model of a virtual church. This example presents a viable dynamic reverberation scheme based image source reflection modeling.

The final section, Part III, outlines an interactive music system designed to extend the effective playback time of a given amount of music, and adapt to the game as the emotional environment changes. This generic system is implemented in Max/MSP as a music system proof-of-concept.