audio-design

Audio design

Game audio is a mixing graph plus a music system. Route every sound through a small set of buses so you can balance and process groups; make music react to play through layering and re-sequencing rather than looping one track. This skill teaches the portable practice; bind it to godot-audio, Unity's AudioMixer, or middleware (FMOD/Wwise) for concrete APIs.

When to use

• Use to design a bus/mixer layout, set group volumes, and apply effects (reverb, compression, EQ) to groups of sounds.
• Use to duck music/ambience under dialogue or impacts (sidechain).
• Use to build adaptive music that responds to combat/exploration intensity.
• Use to add SFX variation (pitch/sample randomization) and sync events to a beat.

When not to use: for the engine's concrete audio nodes/streams, use godot-audio or the engine's audio skill. Loading/streaming and asset import are engine concerns. For UI sliders that drive bus volume, see the engine UI skill.

Core workflow

1. Lay out buses, not per-sound volume. A typical tree: Master ← {Music, SFX, Ambience, UI, Voice}. Everything plays into a bus; the player's settings sliders map to bus volumes. Never set hundreds of clip volumes by hand.
2. Work in decibels, not linear. Perceived loudness is logarithmic. Volume controls and automation should operate in dB; convert only at the edges.
3. Leave headroom and hit a loudness target. Keep true peaks at or below -1 dBTP and measure integrated loudness over a representative play session with an ITU-R BS.1770 meter. Sony's ASWG-R001 recommendation, the usual reference, is -24 LUFS (±2) for console/PC played on TVs and speakers and -18 LUFS (±2) for handheld/mobile. Music-streaming targets such as -14 LUFS are not game targets.
4. Duck competing sources with a sidechain compressor (or volume automation): when voice/important SFX plays, the music bus dips, then recovers.
5. Make music adaptive via vertical layering (stems faded in/out) and/or horizontal re-sequencing (swap segments at musical boundaries). See the reference.
6. Vary repeated SFX with small random pitch/volume offsets and sample pools so footsteps and hits don't sound robotic.
7. Verify on real output. Listen on headphones and speakers; check that the mix balances, ducking is audible but not pumping, and music transitions land on the beat — never assume from the editor meters alone.