How we made the GBA sound good

GAME BOY ADVANCE MUSIC AND SOUND CHALLENGES

The GBA isn’t known for its sound. The static sounds you often hear in Game Boy Advance games are called artifacts.

GBA storage is 8 or 16 megs, 30 seconds of sound is 1 meg, so you can see there isn’t a lot to work with.

Unfortunately some solutions to limited storage result in lower quality. A common solution is to compress the sound files.  When files are compressed they result in lost information.

The other reason for the artifacts is a game’s sound wasn’t always coded at the same sample rate as the hardware. In other words the input didn’t match the output.

HOW MADE THE SOUND ENGINE AND MUSIC

In addition to all the programming and puzzle designs, Sean composed all the music.  He made the songs in FamiStudio and they are pretty darn catchy. He went with the synth sound as that would sound best on the GBA.

Similar to how art is stored as tiles to be assembled, we stored the music as individual, high quality, uncompressed sound waves to be assembled into music. These sound waves are then stretched to create different notes. One of these sound waves could be stretched to create approximately 8 notes. The entire 16 minute Inky and the Alien Aquarium soundtrack is created by 106 sound-waves. Essentially we are getting 3216 megs of music out of ½ meg storage.

Our solution to align the sample rates is too technical to get into here, but you can read all the exciting details about our sound engine gvsong here. The TLDR version is we took a lot of extra steps to get exceptional sound for our game.