In this section, our goal is to understand how Unity scripts integrate as components on top of GameObjects. If you recall from Chapter 1, Introducing Game Audio in Unity, all the functionality built into Unity is in the form of components and components are just scripts and code. Take a look at the following diagram, which should demonstrate the basic concepts of a GameObject and Component:

As the diagram shows, all objects are derived from GameObject, which means, they all essentially share the same base level object. If you look at the bottom of the objects in the diagram, you will see a component called MonoBehaviour with Transform. As we will see, MonoBehaviour is the base component, that we will generally derive other components or scripts from.

Now that we have looked at how quickly we can create a simple empty script, let's explore the possibilities of scripting audio components. As we already saw in the last chapter, it is possible to use audio components without writing any scripts. However, scripting gives you more control over an audio source with only a few lines of code.

In this section, we are going to use scripting to build a simple keyboard that you will be able to play multiple instruments with. We will even allow the keyboard to record and play back sessions. All in less than 30 lines of code. Follow the instructions here, to start creating this script:

1. We will continue where we left off from the last time by jumping back into MonoDevelop. Be sure the tab showing the Keyboard script is open and the script shell has not been modified.
2. At the top of the file, just below the...

In the last couple of sections of the last chapter, we introduced ambient sounds as the first layer or group of audio to our Viking Village. For this section, we are going to introduce a new layer of audio, the direct feedback group. If you recall from the introduction in the first chapter, this is the layer of audio that covers sounds activated by a player action or reaction within the game, which may include audio such as explosions, weapons, character dialog, or boss music.

Back in Chapter 1, Introducing Game Audio with Unity, we introduced the terms diegetic and non-diegetic. Are you able to categorize the audio we have used thus far or in the next examples as diegetic or non-diegetic? A quiz will be provided at the end of this section.

What better way to introduce direct feedback audio than by adding a weapon and the sounds associated with a weapon. For...

Randomizing audio is the practice of tuning an audio source playback in a random manner to avoid exact repetition in your games audio. Of course, another way to avoid audio repetition is create multiple sound effects for the same noise, music or dialog, and then randomly select one each time the audio needs to be played. While using multiple variations of the same audio clip is preferred it does increase memory resource usage and asset management.

For this section, we are going to borrow a couple techniques we already used to slightly alter or randomize the playback of our audio without needing to provide multiple variations. Open up Unity and follow the following exercise to randomize the scene audio:

1. Locate the axController script in the Project window and then double-click on the script to open it in your editor.
2. Scroll down to around line 21 as shown here...

In the last section of this chapter, we will introduce another layer of audio with background or theme music. This is an often overlooked layer that can really set the mood of the game or during the progression of a game. In later chapters of this book where we cover adaptive music we will get into detailed examples of altering music during gameplay. For now though, we are going to look at a simple use of scripting to set the looping behavior of some background music we want to use for our scene. Follow the instructions here to add background music to the scene:

1. Open up Unity to the Viking Village scene as we last left it. Create an empty GameObject in the scene and rename it BackgroundMusic.
2. Locate the viking_music audio clip in the Project window. Drag the clip onto the new BackgroundMusic object in the Hierarchy window. This will automatically add an audio...

In this chapter, we introduced Unity scripting at a very high level. Even a basic understanding of scripting will be essential to sound designers or other artists working on Unity projects, as it provides them with the ability to make simple changes without interrupting a dedicated developer. From a basic scripting introduction, we worked our way into a more practical example of writing a simple musical keyboard. It not only introduced additional scripting concepts but also exposed how some of the essential audio source component properties can be altered to match an instrument. After that, we jumped back into the Viking Village project and looked at another good scripting example that showcased weapons. Through repeated testing of our scene we then realized our audio was becoming quite repetitive. The solution was to introduce volume and pitch randomization on our audio...