This week our guest lecturer spoke about sound design. Sound is never a “post-retouching” added to the picture, it actually determines how the player “perceives the world”. Sound is not a foil, but part of the perspective. This class made me think about game design from an audio perspective, rather than as a technical link.

But I must be honest: this class was not as “new” to me as I thought.

Not because the content is bad, but because I’m currently learning more about sound design itself, including DAW manipulation, spatialization, timbre shaping, material layering, etc., so a lot of the concepts are already part of my daily workflow.

It is precisely because of this background that my attention in the classroom naturally does not stop at “knowledge itself”, but begins to focus on: Why is this basic knowledge so important? Why do they become the “language” of all sounds?

When the lecturer said that “sound is not post-production, but part of the constructed space”, I realized that it is, but the real key is that the sound in the game is more “structured” than in the film. It not only shapes the mood, but also the rules, the direction, the danger feedback, the sense of rhythm – that’s what I really encounter in my daily production. So instead of “what did I learn”, I was thinking about “what I already know mean”. I found that familiar knowledge has a completely different use in the context of game design, and that was my biggest takeaway this week.

The instructor mentioned that each hero’s footsteps in Overwatch 2 are different, and it suddenly made me realize that sounds are not just atmosphere in the game, but information. I used to focus more on the spatial sense of timbre, layering, and reverb when making sound, but OW2’s footstep design tells me that sound itself is a kind of “playability”.

Players don’t need to see enemies, just hear footsteps to judge immediately:

Is it a lightweight Tracer? Heavy Reinhardt? Or Genji who climbs walls?

In other words: footsteps = identity + function role + threat level.

It’s like an auditory version of the UI.

This reminded me of my own sound design habits: I always think of “footsteps” as sounds to fill in later, but they are actually tied to the game mechanics. The way a character moves and weighs can be heard in the footsteps – this is more important than reality, more important than sounding.