Illustrating the art of technical sound design can be a tricky thing. Fundamentally the role I play is usually as a supporting actor for the lead role of content creator. My job is to make other peoples sounds sound good, so to speak. How that get's done from project-to-project can be a bit of a mystery. A little bit of pipeline, some animation tagging, ambient placement in a level editor, text file hackery, code spelunking, maybe some audio middleware wrangling? I've always tried to expose the inner workings of the process: from my first title rocking FMOD on Conan, unleashing mad physics on StarWars: The Force Unleashed, complicated vehicle simulations of The Saboteur, and now Uncharted 3.
Game audio demo's for technical sound design are inherently difficult to create. How do you express in a video the process of finding and unifying the implementation across over 300 doors in a game like Dead Space 3? Or what about the look of the producers face when one morning, after weeks of preparation, you flip the switch on the impact implementation for 150 physics objects in Uncharted 3? Pushing thousands of lines of dialog through the pipeline on Marvel Heroes was no small task, but how to show the work?
If you're lucky enough to have survived the development of a game you at least have the pixels on screen and the sound from the speakers to tell the tale, but in the case of technical sound design that is usually only half the story. So it's always a challenge when I try to put together something that represents the work that I've done. Thankfully I've gotten to work with some amazing sound designers (on some amazing projects!) whose work helps carry some of the explanatory text that seems like a necessary evil in these long-form video exposés. Hopefully the side-effect of creating these is that people can gain a greater understanding of the work that goes into making great sounds sound great in-game. It should be clear (by now) that sound for games is nothing like film. Nowhere is this more true than in the role of technical sound design.
Uncharted 3 - Technical Sound Design: Physics Set Pieces from lost lab on Vimeo.
Uncharted 3 - Technical Sound Design: Procedural Animation from lost lab on Vimeo.
Uncharted 3 - Technical Sound Design: Physics Impacts from lost lab on Vimeo.
Uncharted 3 - Technical Sound Design: Animation Set Pieces from lost lab on Vimeo.
Star Wars - The Force Unleashed:
The Saboteur: Conan:
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