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 Grab - Et In Arcadia Video

In case you can't tell, I've been cleaning my desk of paper work and inspirational debris that has been deposited or accumulated over time. This habit of cataloging noise curiosities was fostered in no small way by a  music magazine out of the UK called 'The Wire' which I stumbled upon for the first time in the mid 90's. A fair portion of any article could be attributed to the passionate and colorful description of music that usually landed (way) out side the normal avenues of listening (which of course made reading about it that much more interesting).

Mixed in among the issues I'd accumulated either at newsstands, or through a brief run of subscriptions, are several pieces that continue to speak to the core sound fanatic in me, and even a couple that cross over into the interactive space I've been living in for the past years. One of these was Ken Holling's historical cross-pollination of video games and music, and the deep understanding of the influence of sound in games.

Looks like in addition to bridging the gap between William Burroughs and Simulations, Ken is also working on a piece for the Beeb: "‘From GameBoy to Armageddon’ looks at the developing relationship between videogames, military training sims and the continuing history of Future War."

"With great power comes great responsibility." - Spider Man

Great words to keep handy on our way through the interactive audio maelstrom.
-lcl