Is it worth it?

[keybol]

I've seen several HTML5 games with no sound even if I play them on browser. Is this the norm in HTML5?

[rich]

I'd say you can still get away with it for most sponsors, but I've not been able to get away with this in client work for a year now.

[Debels]

I see many that get away with the no music/sound, but I personally prefer to add music and sound since it gives the game a nice touch.

[mwatt]

It's really not all that hard to do simple sounds or even music.  Interleaving multiple sounds can be tricky/problematic, and there are some issues with mobile Safari - but you can do a lot with just carefully using single sounds.

 

I personally would suggest looking into Howler.js if no sound engine is available in the games fw/libary that you are using.

 

If you like, have a look at this blog article to see some examples of using HTML5 Audio and Howler.js:

http://uberiquity.com/blog/index.php/2013/12/coaxing-sound-out-of-the-browser/

[1-800-STAR-WARS]

Is there a way to detect the number of available sound channels? It'd be nice to sort of gracefully degrade sound based on the device capabilities. At work we've had to stick with 1 sound channel (using a single sound sprite) as the majority of our players are on iOS. Would be cool to be able to go 

if (device.soundChannels < 2) { backgroundMusic.mute() }

 or whatever.

[mwatt]

Not that I know of.  You can browser sniff I guess, but that's not a very good approach.

[Gio]

Now that WebAudio is becoming more common, we are starting to write two separate audio implementations for our games. Basically if web audio is supported, we go with multiple sounds (and even procedurally generated ones, which is really cool). If it isn't supported, we fall back to a single sound sprite / soundtrack.

 

This isn't ideal, you do get some false negatives: for example if you're building a Windows 8 App, you cannot use Web Audio, but you could still play multiple sounds at the same time.

[Belar]

Personally I would say game type matters too. There are games which people play just to kill time in queue, during lectures, at work etc. Those are usually simple on click/slide action games, take jewels for example. Generally puzzle games should be more lack of sound friendly than for example shooters where you have shots, explosions and so on. Anyway, well design sound can be a great improvement to a game.

[keenblaze]

I think it's not a big problem because there are great sites with free music&sfx such as jamendo.com, ccmixter.org and freesound.org. Games without sound look sad //