Game Developer - Sound Design: The Forgotten Team

This bit hit too close to home when I read it the first time. I though "In a few short paragraphs someone at a production level has boiled down the plight of game audio across the industry." I say that because it has been my experience that most of the time what he describes is not the exception but the rule in today's development cycle. I can say no more, but feel inclined to excerpt "What Went Wrong #5" from the recent Game Developer postmortem for Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions.

"Along the chain of production, many design choices occur, and just as many changes are made, if not more. When delays happen at any stage in the process, the last team in the line of production is the one trapped against the deadline wall. This was the audio team on Shattered Dimensions.


As the entire development team iterated on every aspect of the game simultaneously throughout development, nothing was ever really final until the very end. Hence it was impossible for the audio team to start working on anything with final quality in mind, and it was very hard to determine what portions of the game could be worked on at what time, with minimum risk. Eventually, when everything in the game reached final quality simultaneously, the amount of accumulated audio work was just too much for the team to handle."

You can read a preview of the article page which includes the full exceprt here:

Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions Postmortem: Sound Design - The Forgotten Team

It's great to see honest and clear insight into the production process as it relates to the sound team.As someone who has personally seen the ripple effect of other disciplines missed deadlines with little understanding of how that effects other stakeholders standing down stream, it's refreshing (if not a little disheartening) to see it in black and white. It's clear that there are many ways to approach a solution to this problem, not all involve jockeying the schedule, but many involve increasing the the awareness of where audio falls in the pipeline and how each discipline affects the eventual workflow.

I'll be looking forward to seeing some of these practices pave the way for a tighter integration of game audio scheduling in the future!

Until next time true believers!

Article Intro - Fear and Loathing in Game Audio

In this month's issue of Game Developer I had an opportunity to write a technically focused review of the current version of Audiokinetic's Wwise. The article comes across a bit dry, and significantly geeky - but it didn't start out that way. Initially I set out with the intent to parody the classic gonzo journalism epic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by the venerable Hunter S. Thompson. So I cribbed the introduction and commenced with some swapping, the results of which eventually ended up on the cutting room floor to pave the way for a more succinct overview of the toolset. If the review makes it's way online i'll be sure to get a link up to it. In the meantime, here's an unofficial introduction to it.

"The production team had given us the audio budget early on, most of which was already spent on field recoding trips to the Bahama's for “source” material. The audio engine we chose had been integrated and tuned up since the first milestone. We were in pre-production and no one expected sound to be up and running so quickly, but here we were at the company meeting with prototype sound systems in place and a first pass on content throughout the demo level.

We had secured 24MB of RAM, an interactive mixer hierarchy, a high powered audio engine profiler, a  full featured Event system, and a whole galaxy of random, sequence, actor-mixer, switch, and blend Containers, and a new suite of DSP plug-in effects including a Master Limiter, HPF, LPF, Distortion, EQ, Gate, Noise Generation, device simulation, and also the ability to apply Real Time Parameter Control in dozens of places across almost every value. 

Not that we needed all that for the game, but once you get locked into serious audio implementation, the tendency is to push the limits as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the RAM. There is nothing in the world more frustrating and challenging and dangerous than an audio team in the depths of game development than an anemic RAM budget. And I knew we'd get close to that ceiling pretty soon. 

Luckily, we had Audiokinetic's Wwise on our side."

To those of you rocketing toward the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week I send along my warmest regards. I'll be deep in the throes of an implementation binge, and unable to join you for the inevitable ecstasy of communication. My thoughts are with you, and I hope you return from adventure with your cup full of sonic goodness, and monumental stories of serendipity.

Austin GDC - SoundWars: The Physics Unleashed REDUX

The conference is officially over now and after a few days of reflection I can say it was a brilliant return to form, from the smaller days of San Jose when a close knit group of audio people stumbled from the Fairmont into the wild fueled by discussions of Sound Design, Interactive Music, and Implementation Madness.

The presentation that David Collins and I did went really well, our combination of creative vision and technical knowledge really helped keep things entertaining during what could have been a dry recounting of challenges and our particular solutions to the Physics Sound conundrum.

What I am constantly reminded of at GDC, is the idea that usually those of us in the community are all working towards solving some of the same problems in parallel. You get the great insight when talking to other Game Audio heads that there is no right way, and you are limited by your creativity, memory budget, and programming resources. During a console generation where we are still striving toward bringing the best experience to the player, we need to all try and remember to focus on Sound and Systems to support the game that is emerging from development.

I think we had it easy on The Force Unleashed, this was a game that was all about kicking ass with the Force. The expectation is that the big stuff would be really big, but I'm also glad we spent time making sure that the fidelity was there for when the player lets off on the gas pedal.

To anyone out there wrestling with the game Audio puzzle, know that there are dedicated and passionate people in the world working hard to do great and artistic things for our medium. I was lucky enough to meet a few down in Austin this year.

For a brief and accessible overview of the Physics sound refer to Jesse Harlin's majestic article from Game Developer Magazine where he outlines each of the systems, and some of the challenges we faced.

If you  weren't on the Ground in Austin this year, and are interested in the slides from the presentation which present a deeper understanding of the technical side of each of the systems...you can grab them here:
Sound Wars: The Physics Unleashed - Presentation Slides

The example video's highlighting the different systems and material types can be found here:


Keep dreaming it,
-lcl

Game Developer's Front Line Awards 2008: FMOD

Here's a nice write up of the FMOD audio middleware solution I did for Game Developer Magazine recently.

Game Developer's Front Line Awards 2008: FMOD

I have to say that tools like FMOD Designer, AudioKinetics wWise, and in-house tools that scale across the digital divide are totally enabling my particular niche and profession within the game industry.

Now if someone could find a way to work some knobs into an interface for implementing sound, I think I'd be all set! then again, maybe I'm just nostalgic for hardware?

Happy New Year!