Sound: Illyriad Sound – The Beginning

Let me introduce myself.

My name is James Bell and over the past few months I’ve been speaking with the powers that be about how sound might best fit into the world of Illyriad. There is certainly room for a few helpful notifications (message received, battle won/lost etc.) but the game certainly has scope to go beyond this – construction sounds when building, a smithy hammering away at the new batch of swords currently in production, trees being felled. It’s a pretty busy world after all and sound could really help convey this.

Now of course what you don’t want is stuff that’s just going to get in the way. Some irritating little tune that plays on constant loop will have people reaching straight for the mute switch (and yes, each player will have sound options for their account). A lot of people spend a fair amount of time in front of this and we don’t want to be pushing anyone to the brink of insanity! Instead it should encourage emersion into, and convey a subtle expansion of the world.

Much of the implementation is still to be decided and the techie bods are poring over HTML5 audio to see how to best achieve things. However, I have already started to collect original sound to create the library that will then be used for the game audio. Keeping true to the Illyriad “better than it needs to be” ethos, mass creation of effects from sample CDs will be avoided, and instead, Illyriad’s sonic world will have as much character as the rest of the game along with the people that play it.

This is the beginning of a long journey and I can honestly say that at the moment, I just don’t know when you’ll see (or rather hear) Illyriad’s first sound. Hopefully not too long for some of the simple, smaller parts, though the rest will no doubt prove to be quite a task! Keep an eye on this blog though and you’ll see how things develop 🙂

James