CRIWARE Powers World-Class Audio in IGT’s Games

We recently added WebGL as a new development target to our CRIWARE audio and video middleware. It is now possible to develop high-quality interactive audio for your web applications with ADX2, both in native mode or while using Unity (further information about the browsers and features supported can be found on this blog post).

Since the industry was lacking a professional solution and adequate tool chain until now, the response has been overwhelmingly positive! In particular, we are thrilled to announce that IGT (International Game Technology), a leader in slot machines and casino games, has chosen CRIWARE’s ADX2 to add interactive audio features to their in-house framework. The WebGL version of CRIWARE, which offers the same engine API and user-friendly tool, will be used in the most ambitious games of the company.

We spoke with Michael Shorrock, VP Interactive Game Studios, who described the reasons for selecting CRIWARE ADX2: “At IGT PlayDigital, we consider ourselves champions of innovative games with superior quality. I enlisted Kristin Miltner, the senior sound designer in our San Francisco studio, to lead the effort to find us a working web audio solution to add to the IGT production pipeline and HTML5 game framework.”

Michael continues: “Our sound designers were dealing with the usual pain points of developing audio for web games.  Because we support a wide variety of browsers and devices, it’s been a challenge to streamline the process. In order to take advantage of the best available quality per scenario, audio assets need to be packed into two or three different formats, and browser/device detection determines which asset pack to load. Kristin saw that the ADX2 technology solved this problem instantly. No need for multi-format deliveries or to add another process in the workflow that auto-generates the compressed files as continuous sprites. I was happy to see that we had finally found a way to streamline audio work in a meaningful way. Sound designers now just export a single binary file that contains every sound in a chapter or even a whole game, along with the logic of how the sounds are played. And as she explained it to me, this is the delivery asset. Nothing more is needed, other than an automatically-generated list of sounds.”

Moreover, the integration of ADX2 in the IGT game framework went smoothly and was done in no time, almost immediately empowering the sound designers:

Michael continues: “First integration was in April. Once it was complete, developers were able to turn their attention to other tasks. When our first game with CRIWARE integration was ready for audio tests a few weeks later, getting a client dev oriented and playing CRIWARE audio cues didn’t take any longer than a day. The sound design team is thrilled that they now also have the creative freedom to program complex behaviors from a visual interface. It turns out that the engineers are happy as well, because they can leave these details to the sound designers, which allows them to give more love where it’s needed on other parts of the game.”

We are looking forward to working closely with the IGT sound team to push interactive audio on the Web even more in the near future!

If you too would like to develop with ADX2 for the Web, don’t hesitate to contact us.

You can check the features of the ADX2 game audio middleware on our web site.

A number of tutorial posts have been published on this CRIWARE blog.

Video tutorials are also available on the CRIWARE YouTube channel.