Learning Objectives

Making games fun and accessible often involves visual and auditory features. In the next three lessons, we will be adding sound to our game. In this one, we focus on streamed sound, which we use for background music.

You will:

  1. Learn about sound programming
  2. Learn about music streaming
  3. Learn about Audacity and audio formats

Warm up (20 minutes)

First, we need to find a cool jam. Use whatever is appropriate for you, but one source for license free music is https://freepd.com/. To the best of our knowledge, all of this work is under the CC0 license. This means that no rights are reserved and that the music is in the public domain.Once we have found our perfect song, we need to convert it into a form suitable for Quorum to use. This is called Ogg. Ogg is an open source format commonly used in games. We recommend using Audacity for the conversion.

Activity (30 minutes)

Once we have our sound, we need to place our converted file into our game folder on disk. We do not do this in Quorum Studio and can use plain old Finder on Mac or Windows Explorer on Windows. For the sake of this tutorial, we placed the file at /Resources/Funshine.ogg. Once we have our sound in a place of our choosing, we will use the streaming tutorial to learn how to add background music.

Wrap-up (10 minutes)

When streaming, we have to do a weird thing: call an action named Stream inside of another action named Update. There are three parts to this wrap-up that we encourage each group to attempt: 1) Describe in your own words to your group what stream does, 2) because Stream is in the Update action, it is called for every frame of animation. Try to reason out why that is, and 3) Explore other actions that are available in the Audio class and explain which you think might be useful for accessibility to your group.

Next Tutorial

In the next tutorial, we will discuss Trigger the Objects, which describes trigger objects..