The first action a lot of our playtesters took in 2026 was not playing the game. It was getting the game to stop hurting their ears.
Across the playtests we ran this year, 382 games were independently flagged for audio problems by at least two of our three AI classifiers, using the conservative consensus methodology that anchors the whole book. The classifiers logged 1,029 distinct audio observations across those games. Every one of them is tied to something a real playtester said in a real session. That puts audio issues at #3 on the list, behind only poor onboarding and unclear objectives.
Audio is the only failure mode in our top twenty that can physically hurt the player. Plenty of bad design wastes a player’s time. Bad audio costs them their ears.
This post is the long-form version of Chapter 3 of our book Top 20 Indie Game Development Mistakes: What Your Indie Game Is Getting Wrong (And How To Fix It). The other nineteen chapters cover the rest of the list at the same depth.
Why audio keeps shipping broken
You mix on your own hardware. Decent headphones, possibly studio monitors, almost certainly a quiet room. You crank the master while you work because you need to hear what each layer is doing. Then you forget that the level you set for working is not the level you should ship at.
You also probably do not test on consumer earbuds. The cheap ones. The pair the player bought with their last phone. If you did, you would ship much quieter defaults, because the first sound your game makes would be physically painful and you would notice.
The second cause is structural. Audio shows up late in development. Sliders get bolted on after the game is otherwise done. Persistence between sessions is rarely tested. Whether the master slider actually affects every sound source, including cutscenes, including the intro logo, including the menu music, is rarely verified. The audio system gets shipped on the assumption that it works, because everything looked fine on the developer’s machine.
The third cause is that audio is a system, not a feature. A volume slider is not a system. A working audio system is: every sound source routed through a category, every category routed through master, every level persisted between sessions, every transition handled, every loop tested for seams, every action covered by a sound. Most indie games we tested have a slider. Few have a system.
What we kept hearing
When you cluster a thousand audio observations from real playtesters, the patterns are not infinite. They settle into a handful of recognisable shapes.
The volume that hurts before gameplay starts
The most common single failure in our entire audio dataset. The game launches, the logo or main menu plays at full blast, and the player scrambles to make it stop.
The sentence we heard over and over was a version of “I had to turn the volume down before I could even play.” Sometimes more graphic: “my desktop is at 4% because if I go any higher it will start hurting my ears.” “I had to lower it to 2% and even then I felt like I could go lower.” “My headphones are already turned down low but even that didn’t prevent me from getting blasted when first starting the game.” Often the player had to leave the game entirely to fix it: “I had to use the volume mixer for this.” “I had to lower the audio intake from Windows because this didn’t work out.” “There is no settings, because actually the volume was very high.”
A lot of these games then compounded the problem by having no volume controls on the main menu at all. The loud logo sting plays. The loud main-menu track plays. In some cases the entire intro cutscene plays before the player can find a settings screen. By the time they find one, the damage is done. “We need to lower the volume because it was very loud, and there was actually no way to lower the volume before the tutorial.” “The first thing I notice is that it’s very loud, so I don’t see any options here on the menu to lower the volume.”
If your game can hurt a stranger before they reach your settings screen, your defaults are the bug.
Sound that never arrives
The opposite failure, and far more common than you would think. The game starts, the player walks around, and there is nothing.
“The game is just completely lacking sound so far, which is a bit strange to me. It’s definitely enabled in Windows.” “I don’t think there’s any audio whatsoever.” “There’s no sound at all right now. No background music, no footstep sounds.” “I can’t hear any sounds. This doesn’t seem to be working for me.” “There is no sound, there is no music. Like there should be some sort of something.”
Inside this pattern there are sub-patterns. Whole-game silence: nothing plays at all. Menu silence: the gameplay has audio, the main menu does not, and the player drifts through the first screen wondering if the game is broken. Action silence: the music is fine, but there is no sound when you jump, no sound when you land, no sound when an ability fires, no sound when an enemy dies, no sound when you take damage. “There’s like no sound effect when he jumps.” “Sound effects are missing for the abilities.” “I just realized there were no sound effects during gameplay.” “There aren’t really any footsteps, not really a punching sound.” “It’s quite hard to play without any kind of sounds.”
Missing sound is missing feedback. The player does not know if their attack landed, if the door opened, if the pickup was real. Every silent action is a moment of confusion that erodes their trust in the game.
Sliders that lie
The game has a settings screen. It has volume sliders. They do not work.
We logged sliders that did literally nothing: “the audio settings don’t do anything.” “The volume slider in the game’s settings doesn’t work. Even when supposedly at 0, the game retains its volume.” “I set master volume to 50%, but no in-game sound could be heard at all.” Sliders that were swapped: “The SFX doesn’t change the SFX volume, it changes the background volume. The VGM background music changes the SFX.” Sliders that did not affect cutscenes: “The volume setting is not affecting the cutscene volume.” “The tutorial intro cinematic is way too loud, and neither of those sliders affect the in-game cutscenes.” Sliders that did not persist between sessions: “It keeps going back to the 100% audio of the game.” “I launched this game twice and it was loud again.” “My audio volume was shot straight to 100% after entering the apartment for the first time and had to put it back to 20%.” Sound effects that ignored the slider entirely: “The sound of the dog is way too loud and it doesn’t take into account my options in the settings.” “I’ve turned down sound effects and I’m still getting high peaks.” “I made the sound low, still the game sound is too much high.”
A non-functional slider is worse than no slider, because the player believes they have control. They drag it down, they think they have fixed it, and they get hit with the next loud sound at the same volume as before. They do not blame the slider. They blame your game.
A mix at war with itself
The absolute volume is fine. The relative volumes are not. Music drowns the dialogue. Sound effects spike fifteen decibels above the music. UI hits land like gunshots between calm passages of gameplay.
“The music is too loud compared to the attacks.” “The SFX sounds are super loud compared to the music.” “Music is great too, maybe a little too loud in relation to the sound effects.” “The monster sound effects are much louder compared to other sounds in the game.” “I think the music’s too loud. My voice is barely louder than the music.” “The voice is too loud.” “Comms overpowered combat sounds.”
Then there are the spikes. The death stinger. The victory jingle. The boss alert. The pickup. The notification. The damage hit. They sit ten or fifteen decibels above the rest of the mix, so the player is comfortable for thirty seconds and then flinches. “The death/victory sound effect is extremely loud. That was a loud spike in the volume.” “Oh my god, that was so loud. Why was that so loud?” “The yes effects at one part just ruined my eardrums. That was too loud, then suddenly silent.” “Some events are absurdly loud, could use some audio balancing.” “The notification sound when you win is very loud.”
And the channel bugs. Audio that comes out of one ear only. Stereo pans baked into the source file at the source level, where no slider can fix them. “The audio is only coming from the left of my headphone.” “I only have ambient audio in my left ear and nothing in my right.” “There is a very annoying wind sound coming only through my right headphone.” “Now I can only hear in my right ear when I’m sleeping.” “The audio for the soundtrack is not centered. A lot of it is more on the right side.”
These bugs are almost invisible to a developer mixing with both speakers on at the same volume. They are the first thing a player on headphones will notice.
Audio that mismatches the world
Sound effects that do not fit what is happening on screen. Wrong material, wrong action, wrong context. The player notices immediately and the spell breaks.
“I’m hearing wooden stepping sounds while going through grass.” “Everything sounds metallic when I hit it. Sometimes I hit wood, it probably should sound like wood.” “When I pick up this paper, or the baseball with right click, it sounds like I’m using a gun.” “Hitting zombies feels more like hitting wood.” “Why do they sound like they are in a tube? It doesn’t sound like they’re in a car.” “When you’re jumping, there are still footsteps. That doesn’t really make any sense.” “Dropping a rope creates a bottle sound, dropping an actual bottle sounds like wood.” “I genuinely thought that was my phone notification sound.”
Some of these are stock library cuts used without enough variation. Some are surface detection bugs where one footstep sample plays everywhere. Some are mismatches between action and sound that no one caught because the developer never picked up the wrong object on the wrong surface. All of them tell the player, very clearly, that the game does not know what is happening in its own world.
Audio that breaks at every transition
Music that loops with an audible click. Music that stops when the player alt-tabs and never comes back. Music that resets every time the player opens the pause menu. Sound that vanishes when you change scenes. Music that doubles when the menu opens because the previous track did not stop.
“The music loop wasn’t smooth, it made like a weird click in my headphones.” “Very obvious music loop there. You can clearly hear where it starts and where it ends.” “I hear a leak between repetitions of the music, it’s not one smooth loop.” “The music suddenly stopped” after alt-tabbing. “When you get back to the game, the music menu just stops.” “The background music stopped playing mid-level and never looped back.” “I just lost my music.” “When restarting after a bug, the music from the previous session doesn’t stop. It continues playing over the new dialogue.” “Something about accessing the pause menu settings also seemed to break the audio, making the game super quiet afterward.” “The song got reset when I press the setting thing.” “Sound went off when I changed character. I can’t hear my auto attacks or the enemies attacks.”
The player does not pause for dramatic effect. They pause because they got a phone call. They alt-tab because Discord pinged them. They open the settings because the audio was too loud, and now the audio is broken in a different way. Test every transition, because every one is a place your audio system can quietly come apart.
How to check this in your own game
Borrow the cheapest pair of earbuds you can find. Plug them in. Put your system volume at the level you would use to watch a YouTube video. Close your eyes. Launch your game from a fresh install.
If the first sound makes you flinch, your defaults are wrong. If you cannot find a volume slider before the second loud sound plays, your menu order is wrong. If the slider lets you turn down the music but the cutscene that plays next is at full blast, your routing is wrong.
A few more concrete checks.
- List every player action: move, jump, attack, interact, open menu, take damage, collect, win, lose. For each one, does the game make a sound? Is that sound audible against the music? Does the sound fit the visual?
- Does each volume slider actually affect every sound source it claims to? Test the master, music, SFX, voice, and ambient sliders against the menu, the cutscenes, the gameplay, the death screen, and the victory stinger. One at a time.
- Do volume settings persist after you close and reopen the game? After you alt-tab? After you open and close the pause menu?
- Open a loudness meter while you play. Note the peaks. Any one-shot SFX that spikes ten decibels above the music is a one-shot SFX that will hurt the player.
- Plug in headphones and listen for stereo balance. Walk past every ambient sound source. Trigger every UI event. If anything plays only in one ear that should not, you have a channel bug baked into a source file.
- Alt-tab out and back. Pause and unpause. Restart the game. Switch between fullscreen and windowed. Every one of these is a place we saw audio break in our transcripts.
The fix
Ship at 20 to 30% master by default. Not 50%. Not 100%. The cost of starting too quiet is that the player turns it up and continues playing. The cost of starting too loud is that the player flinches, drops the controller, and writes a refund review. Those two costs are not symmetric. Pick the safer one.
Provide separate sliders for master, music, SFX, voice, and ambient or cutscenes. Verify each one actually affects every sound source it is supposed to. Verify they persist between sessions. Verify they apply to cutscenes and menus, not just gameplay. This is a one-hour test that catches most of the slider bugs we logged.
Run a loudness pass on every one-shot. Death stingers, victory jingles, UI hits, pickups, boss alerts, damage hits. Compare each one to the baseline music level. Normalise or duck anything that spikes above the rest. The flinch moments in our transcripts were almost always single sound effects that no one had levelled against the rest of the mix.
Cover every player action with a sound. Every pickup, every ability, every UI click, every footfall on every surface, every jump and land. Make sure surface detection is right. Wood for wood, grass for grass. The number of testers who said “I genuinely don’t know if I am hitting anything” was higher than we expected.
Listen on headphones, then on cheap earbuds. Stereo bugs are invisible on a calibrated stereo pair playing the same audio at the same level. They are the first thing a player on headphones notices.
Test every transition. Alt-tab. Pause. Restart the run. Open and close the settings. Switch fullscreen. After each one, check that the music still plays, that it has not doubled, that it has not desynced from the visuals, and that the volume settings are still where you left them.
What “fixed” looks like
A first-time player launches your game and is not hurt by it. They find the volume slider in the first menu they open, before any loud audio plays. They can balance music and SFX independently, and their settings are still there when they come back tomorrow. Every action they take produces sound. Every sound matches what they see. Music loops cleanly. The mix is even. No single sound effect makes them flinch.
They never think about the audio. That is when you know the audio is doing its job.
Get the full book
Audio is one of twenty mistakes we found running over a thousand professional playtests on indie games this year. The full book, Top 20 Indie Game Development Mistakes: What Your Indie Game Is Getting Wrong (And How To Fix It), covers the other nineteen at the same depth, with the same evidence base of real playtests and real players.
You can download it as a free PDF at weplaytestgames.com/book.
If you want a one-hour professional playtest of your own game, that is the service we run. $20 gets you the video, the transcript, and a report scored against every one of the twenty checks. The next stranger who launches your game should not have to flinch first.