I am currently working on a small mini game and before outsourcing the audio I thought let's give it a try. I have no experience with audio or music. The game is really small and therefor I want to try it myself however I have no clue where to start. I searched a bit on the internet on subjects on this but there is not a lot of information available for a newbie. Even here on the forums I searched a bit and only came up with how to break into the game audio industry. From my colleague I borrowed a DVD filled with audio files but there are so many audio clips I have no idea where to start. What I am actually looking for is a guide something like this: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art/features/CoderGameArt/ only then for game audio. Hope someone can give me some pointers

Have you read the 'Starting your career as a composer-sound designer (FAQ and answers)' sticky thread?

Quote: Original post by Kylotan
Have you read the 'Starting your career as a composer-sound designer (FAQ and answers)' sticky thread?

Yeah I did... But this is my point. This is about a guy who is professional sound designer and did a music study. I know nothing about this stuff. I want a guide that gives me a brief overview on which path to walk to get to simple sound design for a game. I don't want the best of the best and for sure I don't want a career in audio production.

The guide I am looking for basically would go like this.
I just want a really basic guide. Some files here, think of this and well you might check this while you are at it and you have pretty lame but OK sound design.

Again I am looking for a guide like this: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art/features/CoderGameArt/ but only about game audio design.

I'm not really into audio and I find your questioning quite vague, but if I understand this correctly you want to engineer some of your own sounds and make them sound good, yes?

Here's my 2 (probably worthless) cents:

-Get yourself a microphone and an mp3 player or something similar as a simple recording device with which you can go record on location or in your house or whatever, maybe take a few samples so you can pick the best one out later for further manipulation.
Heck, you could even use your own voice.
Then you could use an audio engineering tool (I play around with 'audacity' nowadays, a free ware/open source tool and quite powerful from what I've seen from it) and give it some more punch/pitch/bass or whatever you want to do with it, tons of options there. I don't really know about any similar commercial software out there.
-You could do the same with the audio clips you were provided or the stuff you find on the internet and make it suit your needs.

Hope this helps a little... :)

At the risk of sounding rude, let me ask you: Why are you trying to do the audio yourself? If you have no experience or knowledge about sound design or music composition and no desire to have a career as an audio professional (or even hobbyist it seems) then why take on this task?

The programs needed to work with audio can be somewhat intense or confusing to someone completely new to it. Then you'd need to learn about audio effects like reverb, chorus, flange, phase, distortion, EQ and others. Then you'll need to know how audio works like what is possible and what isn't and also understand production like why you don't want to mix too close to 0 dB. Do you know what audio formats and sampling rates are supported in your game's engine? Are you aware of how the sampling rate can impact the quality and size of an audio asset?

In no way am I saying this is impossible to learn- it isn't! But it can take some time and some investing. I learned all of the production and audio related material on my own while going to college. But if you have no desire to pursue audio as a career or hobby, then why not contract out someone who is? This way they'll already have the tools and knowledge and you'll probably get your audio content much faster this way. Take a look around the web, there are many young(er) composer-sound designers out there that are willing to work for peanuts... if not just for resume credit alone. So cost shouldn't be a factor if you can find the right kind of candidate. It would probably be much cheaper and faster to pay a younger audio guy then go out and try to purchase or attain all of the needed materials. You don't even list any audio software that you have (if any) so we cannot help by saying "this program does X, Y and Z" or "To do this in program J press this key then..."

Get someone to do the audio for you. That would be my suggestion.

Thanks,

Nate

As with any side of game development, you have to learn the tools. There's a wide range of audio applications to pick from, but for any beginner in this field I would point them towards Audacity -

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

As pundit stated, it's a freeware open source audio editor that's very simple on the surface, but is very powerful as well.
I've been using Audacity for a good 2 years now and I've never "graduated" from it to a commercial alternative - not just because I don't have the money for Sound Forge or whatever, but because I don't need to.
You'll also need to know (at least) the basics about how digital audio works, and what different types of effects and filters do. Unfortunately, I can't point you to an article for that since I've gradually gleaned that information over the years from countless sources.

That's just for sound effects design - if you want to know more about music then there are even more things to learn.