On November 11^th, 2025, guest speaker and music designer/ producer Dave Milln came to WSA to give our class a talk on “How Sound Shapes Play” – audio and sound design in games design and how we can use it to engage players in different ways.

Dave currently works part-time as a teacher of music and music technology at both Bryanston School and Rochester Independent college. He also is self-employed at Scout Audio, a small music production company that provides music and audio services to video games and other interactive media.

He taught us about the functions of game audio:

• Connecting the player to the game world and keeping them there – this is called anchoring.
  • Gives the player a strong sense of presence.
  • Immersion creates believability.
• Communicating information about the game and setting to the player – informing them.
  • Feedback and reward: did you press the right button, get a headshot, etc? Use SFX to create intrinsic rewards.
    • A strong example of this is the coin from Mario. They aren’t worth much on their own, but it feels good to collect because of the sound design.
  • Can direct player focus away from and to certain things.
  • Can evoke certain emotions: for example, when there are no enemies left in a fight, the music often stops or becomes less intense.
  • Accessibility – using audio to guide certain players with disabilities.
• Create a branding/ identity for your game.
  • Music that can be used in game products or with the studio brand.
  • Make sounds recognisable and iconic!

Furthermore, we learnt about the different categories of game audio.

Sound:

• Ambience – setting the scene/ anchoring
• UI/UX
• SFX – character/weapon/object sounds
• Silence – exclusion of sound can actually be more powerful

Music:

• Diegetic – exists within the game world (for example: on a radio)
• Non-Diegetic – only for us as players/ doesn’t exist in the game world.

Speech:

• Voice-over – narration (diegetic OR non-diegetic).
• Dialogue
• Voice chat? In online games this is important to account for.

After our work I got the chance to chat to Dave personally about my project, and he was definitely interested by it! We talked about the type of sound engineering I’d need for my game: it would be great to have background chatter in the game scenes, so we talked about the idea of “wala” – essentially crowd sounds and how they could apply to my game.

We also came up with the idea together (with help from Maria too!) of the background soundscape changing when an NPC doesn’t like your response, becoming quitter and muffled to portray the tensions of social anxiety.

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This talk with Dave really helped me to realise how significant of a role sound plays in games, and I’ll definitely be giving it a bigger spotlight as I go forward with developing my game idea. I’ll also keep our discussion at front of mind, and hopefully can reflect the ideas we brainstormed in my GDD.