Andrew Quinn, sound designer at Splash Damage, was kind enough to speak to Designing Sound about his work on the recently announced mobile strategy title RAD Soldiers on the new social label WarChest. The music for the game was produced by Marc Canham of Nimrod Productions.

DS: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far?

AQ: I always had an interest in sound and music. In my youth I played guitar in local bands, recorded music with friend’s bands and generally made a racket. This messing with sound and music led to me studying a BSc in Creative Music and Sound Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. During the course I got a chance to delve into post-production and more importantly game audio in the third year and I really enjoyed it. I stayed on another year at Leeds to do an MSc in Sound and Music for Interactive Games under the expert tutelage of Richard Stevens and David Raybould.

After I graduated from the masters, I really struggled to find a job in the games industry. Luckily, the university was looking for a part-time lecturer on their audio course and they took me on. As it was only part-time it gave me a bit of time to work on my own projects and get a portfolio of work together. One project I got to work on was the Game Audio Tutorial book by the aforementioned Leeds-based lecturers Richard Stevens and David Raybould. I ended up creating the tutorial levels and sound library bundled with the book.

That summer I decided to attend the Develop audio track in Brighton to do a bit of networking and generally get my portfolio about. I must have done something right as a few weeks later I secured a couple of interviews and later a job offer.

I joined Splash Damage just before BRINK shipped and I’ve been there just over a year now.

DS: Is there an area of sound that you’re particularly drawn to?

AQ: My main focus is sound design and implementation, that’s what I do. I particularly enjoy creating creatures and weapons.

DS: How did you approach pre-production for a mobile title such as RAD Soldiers? How did this differ from your work on a console title?

AQ: Pre-production for this title was very short. The game had already been going a little while when I was brought on, there was quite a bit of concept art, some of the characters and environments were being worked on and some of the base gameplay was already in. After I joined the rest of the team and I spent some of time working on the overall direction of the sound design and music. I came up with some style examples for the music and did a few pre-sonics for some of the ambience and weapons. I also wrote a document with some initial ideas for cool little audio systems we could have if we had the time to implement them.

In general though it’s very similar or I should say my approach is very similar, but scaled down. For instance, rather than ten variations of a knife stab or punch, we’ll have two. Instead of having all the characters speak localised dialogue, we’ll have very general barks, grunts and vocalisations that could be interpreted in any language. We may not have the same amount of time or budget as a AAA game but I still approach every sound with the question “How do I make this as good as possible with the resources available?”

DS: How large an influence did the Strategy genre and multiplayer aspects of the game have on your decisions?

AQ: We took a bit of inspiration from some strategy games, the Command and Conquer series and Worms being two notable examples. This was more their tongue-in-cheek approach to rather than a particular style.

DS: How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How closely do you work with the other departments?

AQ: During development I was sat with the team working on a pair of headphones rather than hidden away in a studio, so communication was pretty easy and free flowing. The team has always been fairly small (at its largest 8-10 people), so there was never the issue of not knowing what other people were working on or doing. It created a nice dynamic where you could iterate relatively quickly on content and make the game better.

DS: What do you feel is the hardest part of creating sound for interactive media on devices such as smartphones or tablets? What were the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision?

AQ: Delivering a compelling and interesting audio experience on a mobile device is quite a challenge, however there were a few things inherent in the game that helped. The asynchronous turn-based gameplay meant that the amount of sound playing at any one time was largely predictable. This enabled me to orchestrate events in a semi-linear fashion, so the overall design ended up being pretty clean. The mix never really gets too busy which can be a problem in strategy/multiplayer games and would be an absolute nightmare on a mobile device. Additionally, for the most part the game has a fixed perspective and player view, so we didn’t have to deal with shifting distances or multiple player perspectives on the same actions which would have complicated the mix and increased the amount of sound playing back. So in the end we managed to avoid quite a few headaches that can be inherent of strategy and multiplayer games.

One of the major issues we encountered was caused by the devices’ ability to only decode .wav or .mp3. Wav is obviously really nice, but for most instances, the size of the file is just too big for a mobile device. Most of the implementation work in Unity was done on a PC that compresses sounds in Ogg, which is lovely. The Ogg compression seemed to hold up pretty well, even at ridiculously low bit rates. However when the build gets deployed to a device, all the sound gets re-compressed into MP3, which created all sorts of interesting problems. Listening back to the sounds on the devices was night and day; there was aliasing, artefacts and all sorts of other compression nasties. The guns and ambiences were particularly affected by this. In the end, I had to spend a bit of time working out what sort of compression values didn’t degrade the quality on a sound by sound basis. In some cases the Mp3 compression bit rate had to be a great deal higher than the Ogg versions to get the same quality.

Strangely, the usual game audio memory limitations haven’t seemed to be as much of an issue as they usually are. The devices themselves have a decent amount of memory, and being sensible about the amount of sound used has meant we haven’t had to go through assets purging quality. Saying that, it’s not like we have skimped on the amount of sound – in fact, we managed to squeeze over 1000 sounds into the base game.

DS: What are the Splash Damage audio team preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

AQ: We use Sound Forge/Protools and a combination of Waves, GRM Tools, McDSP and Sound Toys plugins for content creation. Implementation in RAD Soldiers was done within the Unity Engine with some extra custom in-house audio components. On our other projects we’re running an Unreal-Wwise combo.

DS: What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

AQ: Sound for games poses a unique challenge that I really enjoy. Not only do you have to create the sound asset but you also have to make it work in an interactive environment. When you have hundreds of events, states, parameters, dsp’s and files being triggered dynamically, just getting a sound playing back in-game as intended is a big win.

DS: Do you have a favorite sound or audio system from any game?

AQ: I can’t really put any one down, but I can mention a couple that impressed me recently. Mass Effect 3 did a great job of selling the scale of the war happening around you in the ambient audio, and the big audio events featuring the reapers were really cool. Portal 2 just generally impressed me audio wise, the gels had some really cool little music systems attached to them and the processing on GlaDos’s and Cave’s voices were really great. Oh and Battlefield 3 in its entirety (damn you, DICE, I want my life back).

DS: What was your personal favourite sound or audio system from RAD Soldiers that we can look forward to?

AQ: I had a lot of fun with the weapon and ability audio, it’s mostly hyper-realistic, overdesigned stuff. They were really fun to create.

Another group of sounds I enjoyed creating was for the UAV character. He’s a plucky little robot that enjoys nothing more than a bit of casual leg humping. The sound of his voice was made using a recording of a screwdriver being fed into a little plastic desk fan and some processing with Sound Toy’s Crystallizer.

Under the hood, RAD Soldiers is pretty simple. There were a couple of little audio systems that I was pretty keen to get in from the start of the project. One of these was a simple ducking system to try and make the big events shine through. It’s essentially a very basic snapshot system that allows us to duck a group of sounds when another sound is playing. We can define the attack, duration, depth and release of the snapshot, and snapshots can layer on top of one another. It’s something that big, grown-up engines have been able to do for a while that I wanted to have.

Oh and seeing as the game is set in London, it would be a shame not to have a working Big Ben!

DS:What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?

AQ:There is some interesting research going on into sound propagation, I’d like to see some systems that approach real acoustic modelling appearing. However with that, I’d still like to be able to tweak and tune how sound plays back within a space rather than having a one stop reality model.

DS: Thank you for your time, Andrew. We look forward to hearing the game in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Rob Bridgett, audio director on Prototype 2 issues a rallying cry for the mixing of the audio discipline with the rest of the studio, and opening up the closed studio space to collaboration -- perhaps even suggesting a fundamental change in studio structure.]

Read more at Gamasutra

Featuring Rocksteady audio director Nick Arundel, and foley artist John Roesch and gun recording expert Bryan Watkins

Click here for the video

Michael Bross is an award winning composer, sound designer and audio director who has worked on such popular video game franchises as Oddworld, Ratchet and Clank and WWE Wrestling, and he is currently working on free-to-play FPS MMO  ‘Firefall‘. Through my own work on Oddworld HD remakes, I has the chance to chat with Michael, who was kind enough to answer a few questions for Designing Sound

Designing Sound: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far? Can you tell us a little about what you are currently working on?

Michael Bross: I was first hired by a small game company called Paragon Software as a composer in the early 1990′s. I ended up doing sound design for them, too, and learned that part of my work on the job. I’ve been working on a couple projects this year which includes an Insomniac project. That’s all composing work. I’m also doing a bit of audio directing a project for Rumble Entertainment called King’s Road. Plus, I continue to write music for Firefall.

DS:  Is there an area of sound/audio development that you’re particularly drawn to?

MB: I go through phases. At times, I’m drawn more to sound design while others I’m drawn to music.

DS:  As an experienced Audio Director, how do you approach pre-production for a project? (defining aesthetic, creating a palette, communicating vision)?

MB: I spend a lot of time understanding what the game is about. I also talk with the key people on the team and we bounce around ideas about what kind of audio experience that we’d like to create. From there, I begin to gather a lot of reference material from games, film, TV, music along with any other sound sources that are inspiring and related to what we’re doing. I, or my audio team, may do some sound or music prototyping at this stage. There are also a lot of technical aspects to plan for a game, too, so I’m laying groundwork on that.

DS:  What are the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision? Do you find the same challenges occurring on different projects?

MB: The main challenge is creating a production pipeline that allows creative people to focus on being creative and less on dealing with technical process.

DS:  How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How do you keep audio in peoples minds?

MB: By understanding who they are and how they contribute to the development process. How to keep audio in people’s minds? It’s a proactive effort for sure, but understand that great teams know that audio is important.

DS: What do you consider to be the hardest part of creating audio for interactive media?

MB: Production crunches, especially at the end of projects. It’s the time period where there are too many things to do and not enough time. At the same time, it’s also an exciting time. Adrenaline runs high.

DS:  You have worked on a wide variety of genres within games, from platformers Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, to upcoming MMO first person shooter Firefall, through to sports / fighting with WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2011. Are there any unique challenges each of these genres poses?

Each has had its own unique challenges. With the Ratchet and Clank project, my focus was less on technical aspects and more on the creative, so really with that, my challenge was to pay respect to the soundtrack work on past titles while also trying to give it a refresh. With the WWE title, my role was to help them transition to new audio technology and pipeline, so it was more about making that happen and less about new content.

DS: You have previously been involved in creating music for films such as ‘Black Dahlia’ and ‘Ripper’. Is there a big difference in how you approach composing for games versus music for linear media?

MB: Actually, those projects were video game projects, too, but they were FMV-based games. The industry went through a period where it experimented with using live-action elements within a 3D world during the 90′s. We don’t really see that kind of game anymore.

DS:  What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

MB: Working with talented people and being in the trenches with them and aspiring to make something astounding.

DS:  What are your preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

MB: I use Pro Tools for sound design and Logic Pro for both music and sound design. I use an array of different plugins, but in general my favorite effects are those that manipulate pitch. Lately, I’ve been playing around with Izotope’s Iris plugin. It’s one of the more creative plugins I’ve come across lately. It’s like playing with crayons. I love it.

DS: On your last project, is there anything you would approach differently?

MB: On my last big project, I wished I would have had more time to go back and revise some of my mixes.

DS: What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?
Closing the gap between content tools and implementation tools.

DS: Thank you for your time Michael

A collection of blog posts, and a special edition of the Game Audio Podcast, have been coordinated by Damian Kastbauer and David Nichols on the dense subject of racing game audio. The remarkably in-depth studies (which feature video examples) rip apart audio techniques for the racing genre, investigating subjects such as tire squeals, surface types, camera perspectives, and of course, the sounds of the engines themselves.

From the Lost Chocolate Blog;

These informal game sound studies aim to expose the technical side of game audio by making an assessment of current generation titles. The assessment is then used as a way to better understand the differences in approach, aesthetics, and progression of techniques across a small sample. By turning the focus onto emerging details that arise during the course of the study we are able to identify area’s of significance and interest that help communicate the current state of the art. These finding are then represented in a content-rich report that includes: videos, article links, and specialized interviews. The goal is to help raise awareness for the technical side of sound design and help in the understanding of what is often not very well represented in current literature.

Check out the study in all it’s glory at the following links:

Vroom Vroom – A Study of Sound in Racing Games ( Introductory article in Game Developer Magazine )

TrackTime Audio blog – Racing Game Sound Study

Lost Chocolate Blog – Racing Game Sound Study

Game Audio Podcast – Racing Game Sound Study (with guests Mike Caviezel, Mike de Belle and Tim Bartlett)

The latest edition of the Game Audio Podcast is out, wrapping up a variety of subjects from GDC 2012 with special guest, Michael Raphael of boutique,royalty-free sound library provider Rabbit Ears Audio. Our  hosts also discuss the GANG awards, FMOD Studio, and newly emerging procedural plug-in formats for audio middleware, such as AudioGaming‘s AudioWeather.

You can check out some of the GDC talks mentioned, plus a wide variety of other GDC audio track content here

Listen to the Game Audio Podcast

David Nichols, of the Track Time Audio blog, has posted a second part of his interview with Nick Wiswell, the Audio Director at Turn 10 and audio overseer of the Forza Motorsport games. In this part, Nick discusses how his team used FMOD to implement the audio, how they sourced rarer vehicles, the complexity of Racing audio, and working with Lance Hayes on the UI sounds and music to create the atmosphere the team was looking for. The full interview can be read here, and you can view part one of this great interview here

TTA: Racing game audio is, as I understand it, very unique in the video game world (much like the racing genre is rather unique). It seems like it takes the right kind of person who’s really into cars to produce a great racing game. Do you feel this is the same way for racing audio? Are there particular challenges unique to racing games compared to other genres (technically and/or creatively)?

NW: Creating audio for racing games has a very different set of challenges to creating audio in most other types of games.

Most games require lots of one shot sounds for things like character movement, footsteps, weapons, VO, world objects and object interactions etc. with a small number of constant sounds for moving objects, vehicles or background ambience.

With a racing game most of the objects in the game and making sounds created from many layers of continuously changing sounds.

Read the rest of Nick Wiswell returns for part 2! on the Track Time Audio blog. ( Thanks David!)

Kpow, the folks behind the audio design of 2011 hit LA Noire, have published an insightful analysis of the audio systems created in FMOD Designer and used in the game, illustrated by picture maps. The post also discusses how the team pursued the 1940′s aesthetic, and the care and attention used to construct the in-game  reverb definitions. The whole article can be viewed here on Kpow’s website.

This game was a massive undertaking. We put a lot of effort into making the audio detailed and realistic, with as much depth as we could.  As it was set in the 1940′s, we made sure everything was period specific, and sat well in the world.  All the interaction sounds were given texture and tactility, and made to sound “in the world”.  We used a lot of outboard gear to get that fat, rich, and occasionally old tube, broadcast equipment quality to many of the sound. We strived to provide a rich, varied and detailed audio representation of the world that was exciting and period specific, and we are incredibly happy with the result and the reception our work has garnered.

Creating The Sound For LA Noire

GDC Vault has published the presentation materials from GDC 2012 online for free. There is a great wealth of information from a wide section of the game audio community, starting with Darren Korb‘s excellent keynote speech on his experience of creating the audio for Bastion in a New York closet. Thanks to Kenneth Young for tipping via the #gameaudio hashtag on Twitter!

All free Audio Track sessions are listed and linked below for your convenience;

(Video)

Build That Wall: Creating the Audio for Bastion – Darren Korb

(Slides)

80,000 Lines, Three Lessons Learned - Ariel Gross

Audio Boot Camp - Scott Selfon, Garry Taylor, Jason Graves, Martin Stig Andersen, Alistair Hirst, Sergio Pimentel, John Byrd, Bernard Rodrigue, Mike Caviezel

Authoring Soundscapes with User Generated Content and Automatic Audio Classification - Jordi Janer

Digital Orchestration for the Video Game Composer - Fletcher Beasley

From Minsk to London: How to make a live orchestra production in Europe happen - Pierre Langer

How To Ship a Game With Voices In 10 Languages? …On the same day? …And Keep It Consistent? - Alexandre Piche

Journey vs Monaco: Music is Storytelling - Austin Wintory

Orchestral Recording at Abbey Road for Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Craig Duman, Inon Zur, John Kurlander

Racing Games: A Semi-Formal Sound Study - Damian Kastbauer

Real-time Sound Propagation in Video Games - Jean-Francois Guay

Spot the Difference: AAA vs Indie VO Techniques - Michael Csurics, David Gilbert

Squeeze Play: The State of Ady0 Cmprshn - Scott Selfon

The Art of Non-Music: Crime Shooter Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days - Mona Mur

The Dynamic Audio of Vessel - Leonard Paul

The Emotional Puppeteer: Uncovering the Musical Strings that Tie Our Hearts to Games - Marty O’Donnell, Brandi House

The Weight of the World: creating massive destruction audio for  Red Faction: Armageddon - Stephen Hodde

What We Learned About Practical Audio By Going To Disneyland - Dwight Okahara, Chris Olander

DS: Tell us about RjDj

Robert: RjDj was formed in 2008 but was actually initially conceptualised as far back as the 1990s. The first app that was released was very unusual for that time because it was doing things with sound from the microphone and using the accelerometer in ways that was not really supported in the SDK. Since then we have done a wide range of different apps, which are about exploring interactive music or reactive music or augmented music and that has gone from RjDj to Rj Voyager through working on projects like the Inception app to Dimensions, the latest one, which is veering more in to the world of games. RjDj was formed by Michael Breidenbruecker, who is one of the cofounders of last.fm and he is the CEO and driving force behind the company. My role is more in terms of music composition and looking after the sonic side of things, and Joe is also working in that area and a bit more oriented toward the reactive infrastructure of how we make music happen in relation to events. He also works a lot more on sound design that I do.

DS: Most of what you do is in Pure Data (Pd). Do you begin the composition and design process in a regular DAW and then migrate to Pd?

Robert: We use a conventional DAW of some kind and export bits that get reassembled in real time based on whatever rules are appropriate for that situation. Much of Dimensions was done in Cubase and some of it was done in Logic and then exported as tracks which are some times stacked one on top of each other and fade in and out based on different user interaction. There are individual hits that get algorithmically put back together on the fly – drum patterns and things like that, and layers of reactively triggered synthesis.

Joe: In our earlier projects we were trying a lot more to reconstruct all the music inside Pd but we obviously had performance hits and we had to optimise it all. In Dimensions, we created all the assets in the DAW and mixed it as well as we could so that we could concentrate on how it played back in Pd. How we construct the assets in Pd is just as important, as it needs to be simple while achieving the same sort of experience.

Robert: In 2009 we did a project that was extremely ambitious. Almost everything in there was algorithmically put together in the mix. It was all stemmed material or individual tracks that were put back together in Markov states and various trees of possibility and based on the user behaviour and all kinds of things. We found it very difficult to achieve a very good level of quality if we were that ambitious with the structure. Also, a lot of the end listeners couldn’t understand the level of complexity we were producing in terms of the structure and the variants of the music. For them it was just music. Now we concentrate on making one very obvious reactive thing over more linear music.

DS: What sort of technical limitations are you up against?

Robert: We have to impose our own limitations because Pd is so open that it is easy to get completely lost in creating some hugely intricate and complex reactive system that no one is every going to understand and you can get very very deep in that and lose sight of the over all picture. It is very dangerous – in my opinion.

Joe: It is too easy to go down that route and just think about making the architecture and not creatively make things.

Robert: The other limitation that we have, which is getting better all the time, is the kind of CPU power and memory limits of the devices. Until Dimensions we have been working at 22KHz to give us more CPU top end to achieve more ambitious real time effects.

DS: Do you filter out the top end to simulate what it might end up sounding like?

Robert: I try to not rely on creating musical sensations that I know will rely on a lot of high frequencies. Its still very frustrating when we down-sample. We try to get as much out of the sampling rate that we work at. We have also written some specific externals for Pd which allows us to playback mp3s or compressed files.

Joe: I think the beautiful thing is that its just a temporary sort of limitation. As these devices get increasingly powerful we can do more stuff and eventually run at 44.1KHz.

Robert: The next app is at 44.1KHz and it will be much more ambitious as well in terms of effects. It always gets bigger with each app.

DS: Along with these technical limitations do you impose creative limitations? How do you know where to stop?

Robert: In Dimensions, there are soundtracks for different parts of the listeners life. For instance, there is the tranquil dimension and we know through the microphone that it is going to be quiet in that scenario. Each one of these factors is the driving force of how we approach it creatively. For tranquil, the brief for the whole of that dimension was creating something that reacted to that type of audio environment and enhanced a sense of tranquility. Equally, in the kinetic dimension, which is all about movement, we know that the user is moving through accelerometer analysis. It is basically targeting a piece of music to push all of the listener’s emotional buttons to make them feel that they are in a kind of action sequence and reacting in a very fine way to different levels of the accelerometer. That is a very powerful brief as a composer and it means that you know that you can create a very dynamic experience for the listener. In many ways its like writing music for games, except, we have the additional hard task of doing analysis to determine what the game events are.

Joe: In any sort of interactive medium, it is important that you have a feedback control that is very easy to understand for the user. In a lot of what we do, the majority of the user’s interaction is with sound. We have to make it very clear in what they hearing that they are affecting a certain part of the track. We have made our own dynamic mixing system to fade assets in and out.

DS: There are a lot of effects on the microphone, like pitched delays and granulation. Were these decisions made before hand?

Robert: Normally what we are trying to do is to find something that transforms the listeners perception in to feeling like whatever the brief is. In the ghosts dimension for instance, it works with audio analysis to decide when an audio event happens and then records that and generates a reverse reverb in real time. There is also one that records in to the buffer and then stretches out that buffer as it plays it back. I don’t think these days we think about CPU limitations very much. For instance, in the second level in Dimensions, there is one called the unstable dimension which has got every type of conventional effects unit in it, all stacked on top of each other and doing all kinds of glitchy sort of effects in real time to the microphone. There is also a new version of the collective dimension which captures a sound in to a buffer and then starts scratching back and forth as if it is like a turntablist on reality. That is the more crazy end of what we try and do on the fly. We do use some very simple effects – even just normal reverbs and delays some times. What is interesting from an engineering/producer point of view is that most people who have never used a studio or used any sort of music production tools find a delay line an incredibly unusual experience.

Joe: We also have the problem that we can never predict what the input from the microphone is going to be. A bus could come by and destroy everything in the tranquil dimension. We have to make sure that we can handle that correctly and it sounds okay.

DS: You obviously use the accelerometer and microphone as sensors, along with the GPS for the map. Anything else happening under the hood?

Robert: We determine a lot of situations that people are in by cross referencing things like the time of day or the GPS combined with weather data of that location. If they are in a sunny environment we put them in to the sunny dimension. A lot of the time it is about triangulating between different sensors to work out whats going on. When they are inside that dimension we will have very specific bits of analysis we do to try and achieve a certain effect.

DS: Any 100% procedural techniques used in the game?

Joe: In the previous update we changed the artifacts so that they are procedurally generated with subtractive synthesis. It was a lot better, because beforehand we were using one sample and all the artifacts sounded the same. Now we can actually generate a load of different sounds. There’s also a lot synthesis work in different dimensions.

Robert: It is all a big mixture really. The common thing with our approach is deliberately doing that so we can achieve the highest quality. In RjDj for instance, I have done quite a few scenes that are entirely procedural. It is very interesting work to do. But when we are designing very specific experiences like Dimensions, we want the best of all worlds.

DS: Do you reprocess the samples to create variation? Any volume/pitch randomisation or granulation?

Robert: One interesting example of that is the sound of the Nephilim, it changes as it gets nearer to you. That is one sound in a table in Pd which is played back in a granular way. There are quite a lot of things that we do in music where we will have samples and play them back at different pitches and we will affect them or algorithmically create rhythmic structures out of them.

Joe: In the kinetic dimension there are five different patterns based on the accelerometer levels and it switches between them quite easily and adds in random variations.

Robert: There is an improvisational level in the programming of the drums so that they are algorithmically improvising. We also have on top that a glitching set of effects that are adding repeats and pitching and other effects. I forget what is in there after a while [laughs]

Joe: It almost doesn’t matter how you have done anything, if it sounds good it is good. You can use any technique, although, it is a lot cooler if it is all procedural [laughs].

DS: What’s next?

We are doing another app – I can’t really talk about it at the moment. It relates a lot more to detecting what is going on in people’s lives and thinking about how content could fit in to those situations. I’m not quite sure when we are going to start talking about that publicly, but it is not a game. We are still very interested in the type of direction we have been going with Inception and Dimensions, which is a holistically designed experience in sound. We are also very interested in music and making music fit in to people’s lives in interesting and new ways.

Joe: There seems to be a lot of similarities in the stuff we are doing and the game world and how they deal with interactive music. A lot of the paths that they have gone down are very similar to what we mess around with.