Rob Bridgett has published a very interesting article on Gamasutra called “Getting Game Audio Right: The Big Picture”. Let’s read!

This feature takes a brief look at how to tie audio production dates into the overall delivery schedule of a large-scale video game — including the key dependencies you should be fully aware of.

During production, it is often the case for each component of game audio to be either dependent on some other area of work to be completed, or some other area of the game is dependent on audio finishing a particular piece of work. Understanding how all these pieces are inter dependant is the key to not only locking-in and delivering on-time, but also to staying agile and having a production schedule that is simple to read and aides communication across groups.

The working practice behind scheduling for video game production is an increasingly complicated one and boils down to an approach that embraces locking-in tightly and firmly committing, yet being ready and prepared for changes at any time.

At the same time, you must also fully understand that any changes will have implications elsewhere in the production.

Continue Reading…

Via: aandersen

“Be prepared to listen to other’s opinions as well as expecting others to listen to yours.”

-Rob Bridgett

[Veteran audio designer Rob Bridgett (Scarface, Prototype) here outlines how audio designers can avoid creative fatigue and deliver the most compelling audio while collaborating on large studio projects.]

There are a great many reasons why gathering critical input from trusted colleagues and other sources is of a huge benefit to improving the sound on a video game production. Feedback comes in many different ways and at many different times, but not always of our choosing and not always articulated in a way that is easy to understand.
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In this feature I’ll explore some of the ways that feedback can present itself, when it is useful, and some methods by which this essential process can be leveraged in order to acquire some truly valuable criticism during development.

Continue reading…

The Rob Bridgett Special has come to the end. We will have 10 tips for sound designers, by Rob Bridgett, plus answers to questions readers made to Rob. If your question has not been answered, you probably find that in the 10 tips or the general interview.

10 Tips for Game Sound Designers

1. In-house or Freelance?

Perhaps one of the most fundamental things to decide is whether or not you are looking for a full-time salaried position within a game development company, or if you are more comfortable with offering your audio chops to the game industry as a freelancer. Composers usually fair better in the freelance realm than an in-house situation, where they would be expected to do more than just compose. If you are a talented all-rounder, you may be equally in demand for in-house or freelance positions. The decision may come down to a work-life balance. Once you know what you are looking for, you can more effectively target employers or clients.

2. Always Treat Your Clients With Respect

Whether you are in-house or freelance, the people you work with should be treated as your clients. As a sound designer, composer or sound implementer, you NEED your client as much as they need you. They may sometimes come up with suggestions that sound crazy, but listen to their ideas, explore them, work on a few examples and try those suggestions out yourself – you may be surprised, something that sounds crazy at first might just work. As a result, the people you work with will feel included in the creative process and you will be happy with a job well done.

3. Demo-Reel

The demo reel is perhaps the single most important piece of work you will present to your prospective employer. So much info about your work and communication style will be communicated through how your show-reel is edited, structured and presented. Don’t send out the same general reel to lots of companies if you can tailor specific footage or examples to a particular company. Include a cover letter explaining specifically why you are interested in that position or company. Keep it simple, clean and always focus on your best work. Also, if you worked on a specific area in a clip of game-play or a movie, such as only the helicopter sounds in a game, make this unequivocally clear at the outset.

4. Make Connections and Contacts Already in the Industry

There are many platforms for this kind of interaction available to people entering the industry, such as GDC. Meeting and chatting with audio talent that is already established in the industry is a great way to make a connection and get some feedback to better hone your job seeking talents. As ambassadors for their companies and for audio in general, people who are presenting lectures, round tables and workshops at conferences are great and approachable contacts to make. Everyone who is successful in game audio now was where you are now at some point in their past.

5. Supply and Demand

There is currently a huge market for composers in video game sound. Look into an area where there is a shortage. Currently, audio programmers, sound effects designers, sound implementers, dialogue designers are all in much shorter supply than composers, so it makes sense that you are more likely to find ways into the industry via these fields. Once inside the games industry you will get ample chance to prove your talent and move into a role in which you are more comfortable.

6. Look for Ways to Prove You are A Team Player

Games development is about collaboration and about finding mutually creative solutions to problems to better service the end product. If you can prove that you have worked with an animator or a director on a short film or game, and demonstrate some of the areas where you have talked about sound and worked at integrating other people’s ideas into the sound, this will definitely impress whoever is conducting the interview. Great audio is about supporting the game-play or the story of a game, not about good sound for good sound’s sake. If the game fails, everyone fails, whether the audio is good or not.

7. Don’t Embellish Your Resume

Putting false or misleading information on a resume or demo reel isn’t a good idea, and you will get found out. Always specify exactly what you did on any particular film or game title, if you just did dialogue editing, then just put dialogue editing, don’t make out like you did all the audio on the game. You will be asked to talk about your work on any particular title, and employers check references very diligently – no matter how much experience the candidate appears to have.

8. Get Experienced

Employers are usually looking for experience above qualifications. A lot of game audio or film audio courses are very vocational in their approach, so this will count to an employer as production experience – even better if you can approach a game developer for an internship.

9. Everyone is A Contact

Making contacts can start as early as college. If you can work for free on a friend’s project, do it. That friend will most likely get a job or start a company and go back to you for the sound, or be able to recommend you to others. Again, if you have a positive collaborative experience working with particular people they will remember you and recommend you further down the line.

10. Flexible Software Skills

Tools for implementing sound in games are always changing, and there is no industry standard for software in the games industry as there is in film, not everyone uses pro tools. learn to be competent on several different systems, sequencers and editors all do pretty much the same job. Learn a wide range of sequencing software as you can, experiment and create projects in Audio Kinetic’s ‘Wwise’ to get an idea how game audio will be implemented.

Above all, in order to succeed in such a competitive industry, you need to be passionate about what you do and persistent in your job seeking. Even if you get an interview with a company and don’t get the job, keep in touch with them and use those connections. They have already interviewed you so you may be an easy hire for them if there is a job going in the future – or if the candidate they hired instead of you doesn’t work out.

Readers Interview

Designing Sound Readers: I’m curious as to whether you feel that the Technical Sound Design role has gained traction across the industry as its own specialization?

Rob Bridgett: It is getting there, but there is still not enough validation or specialization in the field to allow someone to solely work on a single task like this. You get this in film, where your job is very specific on a project, for example a dialogue editor. Perhaps in games this is because generally there is only one project and the needs of that project change so much during production that to hire someone specifically at each single stage, at least at the moment, wouldn’t make much sense. In film post, lots of projects are coming through the door, all at relatively the same place in their production, but in games you have this single project with shifting production demands, rather than a lot of projects with a single production demand – if that makes sense? But anyway, the implementation side of sound design is certainly a big part of the sound design process, I think these implementation / design roles are a foot in the door towards becoming an audio director or audio lead.

DSR: Are there aspects of game audio that you wish would get more attention from professionals on the development (non-audio) side?

RB: Number one on that list is writing. Writing is so deeply embedded in a game’s design, sound and presentation that I really wish all development houses had a recognized internal job position of writer. Someone on-staff and a part of the design team full-time. Often designers express an interest and even a passion for dialogue and writing at the beginning of a project, and unfortunately they end up getting taken off writing and put onto scripting missions. It’s a real shame, because it’s the area where the whole game design takes shape in a sense, if you have a feature it needs to be communicated, both in terms of how it is introduced to the player, how it is to be used and how it sounds when being used. Writing for games is, in my opinion, something that has to be done in-house if it is to truly develop, no matter how much outsourced writing is attained, its roots and its final pass are always implemented and edited in-house and the final call for presentation is an in-house one.

One thing I am thinking a lot about right now is dialogue as sound design, meaning that the spoken word contains so much potency to convey not only information but history, political history, culture, emotion, mood and is at the same time very musical in its phrasing. Some film directors use the sound of the spoken word to its full degree, David Lynch’s ‘Straight Story’ for example, as well as film makers like Ken Loach who foreground language, dialect and its tone and history as the centre-piece of their film making.

DSR: What techniques do you use for designing sounds? Using synths or recording sounds from landscapes etc? or maybe both?

RB It completely depends on the context and the content required. If I need organic or real-world sounds then recording a variety of objects, literally anything, for Foley or for use as sound effects elements. For more sci-fi or User Interface menu sounds a combination of synth and processing of pre-existing sounds may work. I’d say in general it is about first having an idea of what sounds I want to record, that are not available in our sound library, and secondly about playing with those sounds (mixing, pitching, eq, editing) in order to get the sounds to fit the visual image for which it is required (if there is a visual). Lastly it is all about trying out the sounds in the context of the game, and then tweaking from there.

Even if it doesn’t fit with the image it may give a convincing feeling to the player that sells the feature even more than if it matches the images perfectly. A good example is an explosion with a cloud of dust. I may create an explosion sound effects that also contains lots of dirt and debris in the tail, this will have the effect of selling the explosion and the rubble that has been thrown up resulting from that explosion, even though all you see is a flash and a cloud of smoke, what you hear will tell you there is metal, rubble, perhaps some glass in there and that may sell the danger of that explosion to the player even more.

DSR: How long do you spend on making a particular sound, say a bullet firing from a gun?

RB: Usually I like to get a placeholder sound into the game first, this is often very quick. Once you hear it in the game, it is tweaked and re-iterated in order to get something that is more meaningful and appropriate. This process may take several days of listening to the sound, seeing if it feels good over time, and then maybe after a week or so, getting tired of that sound and needing to try something else. This process of letting sounds bed-in and then tweaking them is very important in game I feel, because the player will hear those same sounds over the course of many hours and they need to remain as fresh and dynamic as they do the first time you hear them.

A lot of this manipulation can be done with interactive mixing too, by having the volumes of teh gunshots vary in certain circumstances etc. Even the best sound effect can become fatiguing after just a few hours, having a combination of sounds that perhaps change over time or having extra layers to a sound that can be added or subtracted during gameplay. The way that guns work often changes during development too, so it may mean re-implementing the sounds several times during the course of th production. Other things to consider are control over the firing rate of automatic weapons, sometimes you may be tempted to fix the firing rate to te rate that is specified by the designers, however this then means a designer is in control of how the weapon sounds, you may want to consider having your own independant firing rate for the sounds, that way you can tune it in relation to the other weapons on a sound basis, rather than be tied to the visual effects.

DSR: How much does the work flow differ from movie effect?

RB: Essentially games trigger sound effects based on events that occur in the game, where as movie sound is sync based with a locked visual image. You may have same amount of sounds or more than are in a scene in a movie, but the difference is that each sound is seperate in games. Technically the workflow is very different, it is slower and iteration time is a lot longer from when you hear the sound you have designed in the context of the game. Often you have to play through long sections of the game just to get to the place where your sound is triggered.

DSR: What advice do you have for aspiring sound designers trying to break into the industry (i.e. fresh out of school)? Are there any certain sectors / locations that have a blossoming sound design industry and are in need of fresh talent?

I think talent will shine through, but just as important as talent is the ability to network. This can be with people who work in games, but it doesn’t have to be in sound. I actually got my first job in games through knowing an animator whose showreel I had worked on and she recommended me to the producer before they even put out an advertisment. It’s not all about who you know or all about what you know but definately about putting the two together.

DSR: What field recorder you use now? some mics?

RB: I use a Sony PCM D-50, I carry it around everywhere I go! Mic-wise, I have no suggestions, find one that sounds good to your ears and fits the job you need to do, oh and rent before you buy!

DSR: I was wondering how QA (Quality Assurance) fits into your production/development pipeline? Thanks!

QA is a huge part of the process actually. QA guys are the ones who spend all their time playing through the game, and may encounter things that a sound designer or implementer simply is not even aware of in the game. It is a shame actually that there aren’t more specific audio QA teams or staff on teams with a variety of audio set-ups like TV, surround (5.1 / 7.1) that can test all the output options. QA teams shoudl also be monitoring and have an understanding of output levels in my opinion, so they can make suggestions as to how may dB the game is too loud or quiet by overall. It would be great to get these kind of tests happening regaularly as soon as a team hits production, rather than right at the very end when it is often too late to make reasonable fixes.

Currently QA spots major things, such as when something obvious doesn’t have a sound effect or when dialogue is missing or subtitles are wrong / mis-spelled, beyond that it is an area that could really use dedicated audio resources.

DSR: Do you tend to always record in both mono and stereo when your field recording? What are the interactive game concepts that would lead you to record one or the other? And, In what order of importance would you place these elements of field recording. Equipment options, Source Material, Mic-ing techniques, Patience, experience in all of the these.

It depends on the end result that is required. 99% of single spot effects I record are mono, as I can assemble a stereo sound in the studio very easily if it is required, similarly with multi-channel surround content. Ambience I always record stereo. Field recording is something that happens after a period of thinking about the sounds I need and having made some rudimentary designs and a requirements list, so by the time I go and record something I have a really clear idea of exactly how I want to record it, and what I want to record – I think that step is essential in understanding the recording process.

Here is the final interview with Rob Bridgett, about Prototype, talking about the sound of the cinematics, the mixing process, and more!

Designing Sound: First of all tell us something about what was your contribution on Prototype and what do you did for the sound of the game?

Rob Bridgett: In late 2007, the audio director for the project, Scott Morgan, asked if I could get involved and help out with the game mid-production. Cory Hawthorne was working as Technical Sound Designer and Implementer on the project which meant I had the opportunity to cover two areas on the game, one was as cinematics sound designer and implementer and the other was as game mixer. In terms of the first role, I was responsible for the sound effects, Foley, dialogue editing and mix of all the cut scenes in the game. The music was edited and supervised by the sound director for the project, Scott Morgan, and once all the components were assembled I would provide a mix automation pass before the finished file went into the game.

The second role, that of mixer, was one that came into play only during the post-production sound beta phase of the project’s development, in which Scott and I spend four weeks mixing the entire game in Radical’s 7.1 mix room. I always welcome the opportunity to help out on projects like this as it offers a break from being an audio director and allows a lot more time to concentrate more fully on one or two areas in particular.

DS : Can you tell us something about the process for the cinematics sound production?

RB: Sure. I’ll talk you through a typical set-up and process that I use on cinematics. The actual work on the cut-scenes starts fairly early in production. Once a script has been approved for production, placeholder dialogue is recorded here, for this we typically just use members of the team to read out the dialogue. We record this, edit it and give those files to the animation team so that they can begin their storyboarding process. They use these placeholder files to come up with very rough timings and shot lists which really gets the whole process kick started. Usually during this time, the actors are cast for the cinematics and they are recorded which eventually means that after a couple of months you have the real dialogue takes to work with and the animation team can start being more accurate with their timings.

Up until that stage, Scott Morgan, the game’s audio director had pretty much run the process, I was myself at this time finishing up the 50 cent game. I rolled onto the project in January 2008, at this point Scott had all the dialogue recorded and the cinematics team had some very rough avi files of the various cinematic scenes, so this was a good time to actually start building up the sound elements and structural foundations of the cinematics.

The first thing that I do is create a seperate Nuendo session for each scene. I typically do this from a cinematics template that I have created in Nuendo, which basically is an empty project with pre-assigned tracks and folder tracks.

• Dialogue Folder Track containing six mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• SFX Folder Track containing five mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only plus five stereo LR tracks
• Foley Folder track containing ten mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• Ambience Folder Track containing four stereo tracks all panned LR and slightly LS RS
• Music Folder Track containing four LR stereo tracks and two 5.1 music tracks
• LFE folder track containing 4 mono tracks all assigned to LFE only.

These templates provide very quick structure to the whole project which is easy to navigate and expand upon. I recommend this for anyone getting into a new cinematics audio project as getting organized at the earliest stages like this saves tons of time later on.

As we had the dialogue ready and recorded, one of the first tasks for me to do was to go through all the scenes and ‘worldize’ the voices – rather than re-recording, I used Altiverb VST for each different room or physical space depicted in the scenes. The roomverb was panned mainly to the fronts (LCR) but also to the rears in order to give the sense of the listener being inside the room and surrounded by the reflections off the walls. This is quite a subtle effect, yet it adds a great deal of realism to dialogue that is recorded close-mic in an ADR room. Further to this some low-end was also rolled off the dialogue in order to simulate more of a distant mic / location sound feel. Having done this treatment on each of the cinematic scenes, it was time to move onto the second phase of building up the sound, adding roomtone and BG ambience.

For each scene and for each cut, I added roomtone that I had recorded here in the various spaces at Radical. There is a lot of AC in Radical and it makes for some useful roomtone source recordings, this meant that I had a ready to use library of roomtone beds which I could quickly edit into the scenes. For each camera cut in perspective the volumes of the roomtones were changed to ensure they corresponded to the listener position and point of view of the characters.

Scott Morgan had also been on location to New York to gather exterior ambience for the game, and it is these recordings that I was able to quickly use and edit together for any of the exterior scenes in the game. In fact, in the end I mainly relied on the actual background ambience file from the game for these ambience beds, as this would mean there was continuity between cut-scenes and game. In some of the scenes we also let the ambience present in the game continue throughout the cut-scene in order to maintain complete continuity from game to cut-scene and back to game again, for these instances, it just meant muting the ambience folder track on export.

With all the reverb and backgrounds built up, some effort could be put into sound effects design. An initial pass was done just concentrating on big fx moments like explosions or body impacts, also because the movies were low in detail at this point it could not be seen what materials or detail would be present in the final movies. All of the cut-scenes in the game used the in-game engine, so the full detail could only be seen at run-time in the game.

For the Foley in the cinematics we contracted Sharpe Sound here in Vancouver to cover the movements for all our cinematics scenes. The Foley was returned to us un-edited so the next phase of my work was to edit all the Foley and premix this so it sat well with the other effects and backgrounds. During all this work, the movies were constantly being iterated upon, receiving a lot of editing work and often large sequences would be re-cut and even deleted entirely. This meant lots of rounds of re-syncing dialogue and effects to the latest cuts of the movies.

By the time we reached Alpha and the work on the cut-scenes was locked down, I had two weeks in which to complete the final effects pass and mix on all the movies, matching the vo, music and effects levels for all of the movies. There were around 30 movies in total, around 45 minutes of in game rendered cut-scenes. Scott and I then reviewed all the cut scenes with the rest of the cinematics team and made notes of a few final tweaks before sign off.

DS: Did you record all the sound effects of the cinematics… what are the sources?

RB: We do have our own sound library here at Radical, in which we have archived many of our sources for other games such as Crash and Scarface. This library is invaluable in quickly getting sounds that I know will work. I think the key to good, fast work is actually knowing your library really well and being able to access exactly what you want quickly. The Foley, as I said, was all recorded fresh for this project, but the majority of the effects, the bodyfalls, punches and transformation sounds were all recorded here specifically for the project.

Perhaps the best example of some of the cinematic sound design we’ve been talking about is the ‘intro cinematic’ for the game which can be viewed online here…

DS: How about the mix for the game? Can you tell us something about the process involved for that?

RB: We have a proprietary run-time mixing system that enables us to do this attached to Mackie hardware control surfaces, the same one used on Scarface that I have talked about in depth elsewhere. For the mix we spent a total of four weeks, this time was broken down into a few different phases.

The first week of the mix was probably the most critical because it was where we set the overall output levels of the game. The first thing we did was to bring the whole output of all the channels down by around -6dB. This is because that when we started listening and mixing at reference listening level of 79dB, the game was incredibly loud. What tends to happen during development is that sounds are turned up and up so that you can hear them while you are populating the game with them, this approach is fine while in development, but at some point you have to reset the whole board and start from scratch again. This is what we did in the first few days of the mix. Getting the dialogue to a decent level and then ‘mixing around’ it is the approach we have been taking. So, once we’ve set our dialogue level, the music will be determined in relation to that, as with the effects and so on. Intelligibility of dialogue is really at the centre of most mixes to be honest, I still hear so many games today where you actually cannot audibly hear what is being said by certain characters because guns are being fired etc. This is perhaps one of the many areas where the styles of mixing in cinema is an influence.

Anyway, once the overall listening level is set, it is a matter of playing through the entire game, identifying key mix moments, mainly dialogue or mission related, but often tied to some in-game feature or effect like the thermal vision in prototype, for which we pitch down the ambience and add a low pass filter to many of the sounds in the game. Similarly for Infected Vision, where all sounds are given a muted treatment except for infected who remain clear and unprocessed during this mode. We also tweak every individual sound to make sure it is not too quiet or too loud. This is what takes the majority of time on a game mix, up to two weeks in this case, and all the time being aware of keeping the overall listening level tolerable for the player at home. Another major thing is to maintain the levels of sound, particularly dialogue and music, throughout cinematics and gameplay so that there isn’t a jarring disconnect between the two modes of exposition.

The final week of mixing we used to test how the game sounded on various mixdown configurations, such as stereo TV and all the various output configurations on the various consoles. The mix is tweaked at this point to ensure that users who listen on a tv set only are able to hear what they should be hearing, usually in the form of a few minor tweaks to music levels and dialogue levels but nothing too significant that it will adversely affect the surround mix.

DS: It’s a video game for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360… to work with sound… what platform you prefer?

RB: A tricky question, as a developer of multi-platform games I do have some opinions from a mixer’s point of view. The 360 is certainly the least complicated in terms of outputs, it supports Dolby Digital 5.1 and stereo (via optical and HDMI) as well as an analogue stereo output so it is kind of the easier to work with in terms of options and checking the mix. However the PS3 has discreet 7.1 support as well as a whole host of audio output options including DTS and PCM as well as Dolby Digital, which does make it more complex for checking and testing, but also provides more options for the user, particularly the higher-end HD audiophile user. As for the PC, this is potentially the most complicated of the platforms to mix and test for, because you can have any soundcard on the market connected to your PC which means we have to test on a wide variety of cards but can’t always be sure of what end users will be hearing. Having mixed the Xbox version of Prototype first, we then cloned all our mix settings and did a mix pass on the PS3 – fortunately the mix translated very well and I think we only made one or two very minor adjustments. The biggest difference being the difference between our two different compression codecs used: XMA on the 360 and MP3 on the PS3.

DS: I saw an interview with Mark Tuffy of DTS who said that Prototype was the first Xbox 360 game with 7.1 sound.. It’s about neural surround… what do you know about the implementation of that process in Prototype?

RB: I actually know very little about the implementation of this in the game from a technical point of view. What I do know is that it is running the DTS Neural surround code on the Xbox360 (there is an option in the sound menu in the game to turn this on or off) and that it is outputting a 7.1 mix of the game when listening through a receiver with neural enabled. The receiver then basically decodes the extra two back surround channels from the Left and Right surround channels of the regular 5.1 outputs. We mixed the game while monitoring in 7.1 on the Xbox, while always checking how the sound folded down to both 5.1 Dolby Digital and Stereo. The game also runs in 7.1 PCM on the PS3.

DS: In terms of interactive mixing, what aspects would you highlight as most important in the mixing and implementation of interactive audio on Prototype?

RB: Some of the action gets pretty intense pretty quickly in this game. Strike teams are sent into heavily infected zones, the amount of sound playing back is huge and there is essentially a sound for every event and collision occurring, so the game needs to be able to deal with this. It isn’t really part of the mixing system but it plays into it, there are limits specified in our engine on the amount of certain types of sounds that can be played back at any one time, such as dialogue or gun shots, and there is a priority system which gives precedence to some sounds over others. To add to this, the mixer system allows us to finesse certain events such as the shot from the thermobaric tank, whereby we duck down most other sounds to foreground this one huge tank weapon ejection to make it seem like it is much louder than it really is!

DS: I think one of the best features of Prototype sound are the ambiences, there are a lot of those and too much recording of many places… Why does the sound team gave much importance to the ambiences? What is the importance of these in Prototype?

RB: You know, the audio director Scott, has written a superb and detailed article on the ambiences in prototype here that can best answer your question… I really recommend it as there is quite a unique approach to ambience in this game, which I agree, works really well in conveying the feeling of New York.

Prototype Official Website

Rob Bridgett:

This is a response, albeit not as eloquent or timely, to Randy Thom’s superb article ‘Designing a Movie for Sound’ which can be found on the film sound website. Much of what Randy talks about in that article can very easily be applied to games production, however I always wanted to read a piece that talked directly to the experience and team structure of game development. In games it is rare to find a single authorial voice, as can be found in film with the director. There are so many different collaborators working from day one on a video game project that it is difficult to know where to begin for a sound designer who is perhaps more used to working long hours at the end of a project. Design is at the heart of video games ‘direction’ and working directly as part of that team is the best place to start. Art direction and technical direction all play heavily into the decision making process. Finding an audio direction that can not only support these other disciplines but can lead and inspire them is the goal for a game sound designer in pre-production. Video game sound development is also different to film sound in that there are often in-house sound personnel (audio director and others) present on a game team right from the beginning concept phase of a project. This presents an opportunity for sound in games rarely found in cinema sound production and this article is really a call to action not to squander and waste that opportunity but to use it fully to make sound an active and full contributor to the game-play.

DESIGNING A GAME FOR SOUND

It appears that game sound designers finally have, more or less, all the technical tools in their arsenal that film sound designers have. We have already seen many fine examples of this on the 360, higher sample rates, more sounds playing etc.

However, this is where games, and indeed many motion-pictures, hit the proverbial brick-wall in terms of sound because story, and more pertinently game-play, must be designed for sound from the ground-up. There is an aesthetic/collaborative issue at the heart of being more like film, and it is something that arguably game sound can do better than film sound.

The movie sound designer Randy Thom has often very lyrically stated that a movie must be designed for sound, rather than the other way around. This essentially means that a sound designer, or a director who cares and allows opportunities for sound to be used well in a film, should be involved as early as possible (meaning the pre-production period) in the story-telling elements of the movie. Although still frustratingly uncommon among movies, game sound can certainly learn, and improve a great deal from this practice as there are often full-time, in-house sound personnel physically sitting in the building at the time of pre-production.

There prevails an attitude among game designers and producers that sound’s job is to work miracles quickly and cheaply at the end of production with little or no collaboration whatsoever. One such core-principle in designing a movie for sound is allowing the characters to listen to their environment and to hear things, essentially to give the characters ‘ears’. This allows the sound designer to exploit more creative opportunities using the point-of-view of a character.

Narrative games certainly have strong characters, and many of them often have very identifiable points-of-view. It is now a real challenge for sound designers to become involved and become more influential in the early story-boarding stages and early game design concepts. In many ways the potential for point-of-view is much stronger in games than in movies. I believe that in order to change this trend it is up to us as sound personnel to be the ones who push for further involvement in pre-production on game titles, after-all it is not just going to happen on its own overnight.

There are now so many ways of manipulating sound available to game sound designers, all they need is a game that really welcomes and relies on sound to form 33% and often up to 90% of the game play. There certainly isn’t the game equivalent of a movie like Apocalypse Now out there right now, which was a movie that arguably allowed the most opportunities of any 20th century cinema for sound to come in and tell at least half of the story.

Perhaps the biggest area of challenge for audio on next generation cinematic titles, and indeed for all development disciplines, is to become much more interweaved with one another from the earliest planning stages of game design both technically and aesthetically.

PROACTIVE SOUND DESIGN

Pre-production is typically a very quiet time for sound personnel on a video game project, perhaps being involved in some ‘look and feel’ movie material for green-light meetings is the extent of the workload. However, try to re-conceive of this as potentially your most productive and collaborative time on a project. My advice is:

1. Ensure that sound is clearly represented at all the pre-production game design meetings, particularly early story concepts. Think about how sound will change over the course of the story, and how to deliver these changes in terms of game play.

2. Ensure sound is represented at all early technical meetings in terms of art pipelines such as animation. Sound should be considered not only aesthetically but also technically as an integral part of any art asset or any animation. In dialogue, consider driving character animation from sound, rather than having to retro-fit sounds to match the animations. The direction for how a character looks, sounds and feels should be a collaborative direction invested in by everyone involved in it’s creation.

3. Be present at story board meetings in order to have input on how scenes play-out, work closely with the DP in allowing opportunities for dialogue to feel natural and also allow for the characters to ‘hear’ things and interact with sounds within cinematic scenes.

4. Be in as many game design meetings as possible, in essence, at this stage it would be most beneficial to be considered part of the design team by the designers. Consider sound as part of any game play device or feature, and how it functions. Always allow for, and state the case for, sound to lead the game play.

5. Be pro-active! Get out of the studio. Remember it is very rare for game designers, animation artists etc to come to you looking for your input on the design of a feature, they usually only manage to find your studio when they need something from you, i.e. when they have finished the art or design and now need to make it sound good, at which point it is often too late. Take a laptop and sit among the game designers or artists for a few weeks, be visible on the team and a vocal sounding board for ideas.

6. Collaboration. Most importantly, remember this is not about your ego! As a sound artist you are collaborating with artists, designers and producers in getting what is best for the game, be prepared to listen to other’s opinions as well as expecting others to listen to yours. It is collaboration that is often the key missing ingredient from sound, game design and art pipelines in the current development environment.

Also read: Designing a Movie for Sound by Randy Thom

]]> http://designingsound.org/2009/11/rob-bridgett-special-designing-a-game-for-sound/feed/ 0 http://designingsound.org/2009/11/rob-bridgett-special-the-role-of-an-audio-director-in-video-games/ http://designingsound.org/2009/11/rob-bridgett-special-the-role-of-an-audio-director-in-video-games/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:49:43 +0000 Miguel Isaza http://designingsound.noisepages.com/?p=1137

The audio director’s role in games is very similar to the role, defined by Walter Murch, of the ‘Sound Designer’ in film, whereas the role of ‘sound designer’ in games, has a very different implication. (Although to be honest, I still think the perception of a ‘sound designer’ in film, to a wider audience, is that of someone who creates cool sound effects, rather than someone who directs the sound experience with as much responsibility as the art director or production designer) The ‘audio director’ is responsible for the entire soundtrack, from dialogue, ambience, sound effects and music. Not only this, but also working with the audio programmers on the desired technical requirements and direction of the audio and the wider design and art team in augmenting and leading feature design. The role requires expertise in each and every area of the soundtrack, and of course an understanding of what will and won’t work and how the balance of all the elements will sit together in the final mix. The role of the audio director changes dramatically throughout production depending on what is necessary at different stages of production. Writing design documents and preparing preview material, testing out implementation with placeholder content, directing and liaising with composers or voice directors, doing production Foley, dialogue editing, running batch processing on huge amounts of data, as well as tweaking and integrating features into the audio and game engine directly. Scheduling and project management skills also play heavily into the role as organizing quite large teams of audio staff (internal and external) can be a challenging task on a large console project.

I’d actually like to say a little about the role of sound designer in games and how that has changed, as I think the audio director’s role has perhaps stayed the same over the last few years, whereas the act of designing sound for a game has gone through significant changes with the arrival of new technologies. The title of ‘sound designer’, and I guess the role, has changed somewhat significantly over the past 10 years or so to encompass the implementation stage as a crucial part of the sound design process itself. By that I mean that creating the sound effects and then creating and setting up the rules and behaviors under which those sounds will be played back in the game are two parts of the same ‘sound design’ process. The days of creating sound effects that sound great on in an ‘offline’ context which are then played back in the game with little or no further manipulation are very much in the past for game sound designers working on console titles. The term that tends to be used currently for this role is ‘Technical Sound Designer’, and I find this terms far more useful a description. I believe the term was coined by Gene Semel, and it implies that implementation and design of systems of playback is an integral part of that sound design process. When we bring in a sound designer on contract to work for a couple of months on sound defects, implementation is probably 80% of their role and we advertise that role as ‘technical sound designer’.

If I can give you an example of a weapon sound, in the old previous-generation days you’d probably just mix together several different effects, the bullet casing sound, the Foley, the tail and various other components in a sequencer and then render those out into a single mono gun shot sound effect which would then be triggered in the game each time a shot was fired. Today, with more emphasis on dynamic and interactive aspects of sounds, and greater ability to play more sounds simultaneously, that same gunshot may be broken out into an initial shot sound, with a separate tail sound or perhaps even the in-game reverb would be used to generate the tails at run-time. In addition, there may be several separately triggered shell casing sounds for different ammo types or the bullet casing falling on different surfaces, and there may be separate gun Foley and trigger clicks all added as separate triggers to the gun firing logic in the game. The firing shot sounds may also be completely different samples for distant enemy gunfire as opposed to close up enemy gunfire, and they may mix together over distance curves specified by the sound designer. This ‘exploded’ view of what was previously a very ‘film-sound’ technique of mixing together the sounds required into one sound for the purposes of implementation requires that a lot of thought and design is put into triggering such sounds. The end result in the game will read as a single sound effect, when in reality the game engine can be playing back many separate sounds, which can all have separate pitch, volume, distance falloff and DSP settings, to make up that single component. The advantage this brings to the game and to the audience is a weapon that feels more dynamic and reactive, and very importantly, less repetitive and fatiguing to the player.

This image is an example of an exploded view of a gun, in interactive design it helps to think about the sound in this way, while always keeping in mind the effect of the final ‘mixed’ version of the sound. Interactive music, ambience and practically every other component of game audio can be thought of in this way too, as an ‘exploded’ view of the many separate individual sounds and tracks that make up a finished sound. The ‘mix down’ happens of course in real-time from the game’s audio engine rather than being the print master mix down that occurs when preparing a final film soundtrack.

So, more and more in games the act of implementation is becoming a part of the sound design process. Run-time is the point at which the various sounds come together, this of course has implications for being able to tweak and tune content at run-time too, and having audio tools that allow this, and also allow the replacement of sound effects while the game is still running, is becoming increasingly important to this process. The implementation is the point where the amount of variants for each sound is specified, the variance in pitch and volume of the files are determined, the maximum and minimum distances for how far away the sound will be audible and how much of the sound is sent to any environmental reverb that may be present in the game. It is increasingly difficult to be able to create sound effects for a game like this, particularly a laundry list of effects like I used to do in the Vanishing Point days, without having a knowledge of how those sounds will be implemented. The implementation changes the requirements for the sounds, rather than the other way around.

Brining this back to the role of the audio director, I think that an understanding and intimate knowledge of these implementation processes is essential in being able to make high-level decisions about how to help improve the sound in any game. Being able to suggest time and memory saving ways of implementing sounds, music or dialogue that may have a similar feel, but use significantly less resources, is often a skill called upon in the closing stages of game development.

Written By Rob Bridgett for Designing Sound.

Another great work of Rob Bridgett:

This was the first experience for me as an audio director dropped into a project as it hit production, so many of the things that are so important to game development like getting to know the team and understanding the project both from a detailed implementation perspective and simultaneously a high-level had to happen very quickly. Joining an already existent sound team can be quite daunting, so this feature goes some way into describing the process by which the work was broken up for the team into sensible areas. Again, these are areas I’ve never seen discussed or written about anywhere else so there is always a need to create these articles where there is a paucity of information. BotS was also my first experience of audio direction from a remote location, in that after six months on the ground with the developer in the UK, I returned to Vancouver and was able to finish the game from there. The move back was very handy as the majority of work I was responsible for; dialogue, cinematics and music were all areas for which we had a team on the west coast. Many of the features from the Scarface game were adapted for this game too, such as the taunt button and the custom play-list music player, both making perfect sense for this IP.

Early Production

It became very clear that the production needed a narrative direction as soon as possible, as production was already underway on in-game assets prior to the existence of any written story. We brought in a local writer, Adam Hamdy, to begin to flesh out some very high-level story ideas and get an idea of characters in the absence of an official writer.

These initial ideas and characters were subsequently handed over to the chief writer who was hired in LA, Kamran Pasha, who worked closely with the core IP group (myself, art director, exec producer and lead designer) in Birmingham via several weeks of conference calls.

Together we sketched out the story and characters that were to populate the final game, while all the time working within the constraints of our in-game locations (which were fixed due to the amount of art and level design that had been already produced).

The grand-concept and art direction for the game established by executive producer Julian Widdows and art director Michel Bowes was that of an over-the-top “music video” and arcade-driven in style.

It is always great, as a sound director, to have such a clear brief and this bold visual statement had distinctive inspiration for much of the sound design, especially of the HUD (points accumulation and call-outs), as well as the weapons and explosion sounds being greatly exaggerated and over-the-top.

The game’s overall direction was also not to take the subject matter too seriously, and to have more fun with the license in order to get away from hip-hop — which is all too often is unable to make fun of itself. The dialogue, particularly the inclusion of a taunt button, was designed to fit this brief, and to create a feeling of an over-the-top hip-hop arcade experience. It also introduced a lot of fun and humor into the gameplay — an ingredient often sorely missing from other hip-hop licenses.

Dialogue

Design of a suitable dialogue system with gratifying yet simple interactions was worked on primarily with the design and AI teams. This work began with breaking down enemy reactions and outbursts into AI categories such as “taking cover” / “throw grenade” / “attack” / “covering fire”, etc.

We also broke down all the categories of dialogue that the player character (either 50 Cent or a G-Unit member) would require, in total each had around 50 categories. Each of these categories was analyzed for repetition in actual game play, and corresponding numbers of variants were mapped out for the more common categories, the biggest being the player’s taunts.

The taunt button was going to be central to getting the feel of “being 50 Cent”. Being able to use comical profanity at any time, totally at the user’s discretion, certainly upped the fun factor, and was a technique that I had used previously on the Scarface game.

Also key to getting the taunt button integrated into gameplay and away from simply being a swearing button meant that when used at certain times after certain kills, as part of a combo, it allowed points to be multiplied with timed use of a taunt. The dialogue content of the taunt button was also made upgradable via the unlocking of extra themed taunt “packs” which increase the amount of things that the character can say on the button as the game progresses.

Because the game was set in a fictional Baltic / Mediterranean war zone, we wanted vaguely authentic and indeterminate foreign voice assets to be shouted in original dialects — not in English with a foreign accent, which can often be repetitive and irritating.

This also meant that we could get away with much less offensive dialogue content, because once it was translated and shouted in an angry over the top performance by the actor, it sounded a lot more aggressive than it actually was. Myself and the core IP group all settled on a mixture of Russian, Serbian, and Croatian voices to obfuscate any idea of a middle-eastern location and to deepen the idea of foreign fighters and unknown forces with which 50 Cent and crew find themselves in confrontation.

Visual Style and Sound Design

There is a striking richness and hi-resolution detail to the art direction of the game that initially surprised me when I first saw it. Finely detailed, high-definition particle effects gave clues to the appropriate audio direction for the sound effects in the game. There needed to be a lot of corresponding detail and richness in the sounds that were created for the game, namely in the destruction, bullet ricochets and key explosions.

Adding many layers of rubble and fine debris to the tails of the effects to reflect and underpin the visual density of the game was one of the key directions established for the sound effects design. Another key direction was for the sounds of the weapons that 50 Cent uses in the game. These needed to follow not a realistic weapon model, but one of over-the-top cinematic power.

One of the things learned from the weapons work on the Scarface game was that it is not about having a wholly authentic weapon sound or weapon recordings, but that the feeling of shooting a weapon (something we did at a shooting range in the Nevada Desert for Scarface) that was the key to giving the players the fun and impression of overwhelming power that comes from holding and firing an automatic weapon.

In this sense we chose to concentrate very hard on getting all the various weapons in the game scaled correctly and feeling lethal and fun, which meant that no original recordings needed to be made. We instead concentrated on layer upon layer of creative sound design using only content from Vivendi’s sound effects library.

This over-the-top direction in turn creates an important point-of-view effect for the player, in that they are hearing the weapon from 50 Cent’s perspective and getting his larger than life bulletproof personality communicated through those sounds.

To achieve this, sound designer Mark Willott and I worked very closely on these particular aspects of the sound design, focusing on and fetishizing many of the reload, shell-casing, and bolt-action sounds to augment the firing sounds. In the end we achieved fairly quick cyclical iteration on the explosions, weapons and ricochet sounds, reviewing weekly during production, and these sounds turned out to be crucial to the overall action of the game.

We often found ourselves laughing out loud at some of the gunplay in Blood on the Sand due to its sheer over-the-top nature, which to me is always a great indicator of a solid, fun action game.

With the sound direction firmly established on-site at Swordfish in Birmingham and the focus of production moving onto assets generated in LA, in November 2007 I returned to Vancouver, continuing sound direction duties on 50 Cent remotely via regular conference calls. As I was now responsible for the dialogue and music content in the game, it made sense that I was closer to the center of operations at Vivendi LA in order to work on the same time zone with the executive producers and our LA-based voice-over studio.

It also transpired that the cinematic cut-scenes for the game, on which I was responsible for cutting sound and mixing, were being outsourced to FX-house Rainmaker in Vancouver, and again being on site in Vancouver allowed me a close working relationship with the cinematics team.

Cinematic Cut-Scenes

The cutscenes in development at Rainmaker were delivered on the production Alpha date, giving me two weeks to complete the primary pass of sound effects cutting and pre-mixing for our Sound Alpha date. The cinematics were are all pre-rendered FMVs, and because the in-game characters, sets and effects are all of such high resolution, it is often hard to tell the difference between in-game and cut-scenes.

Due to the high quality rendering of these scenes, there was great incentive to get them to sound as cinematic as possible. A week of Foley recording was carried out at Sharpe Sound in Vancouver, and these Foley tracks were integrated directly into my Nuendo sessions back in the mix studio at Radical.

Working on FMV cinematic visual assets offers much more creative inspiration for the soundtrack than NIS in-game cut scenes in games, as the latter tend to give very low resolution, grey-blocked assets to the sound designers to work on.

The more detail that is visible in the final movies that go out to places like Foley outsourcing, the better the quality of work you get back in the end, due mainly to it being obvious what materials the characters are walking on and interacting with. As well as this, having all the visual and particle effects as part of the movies adds additional clues for the sound designer.

Post-Production and Final Mix

Music and dialogue assets were edited and mastered at Radical by our senior studio engineer Lin Gardiner, ensuring that all the levels of both the score and the licensed tracks from various sources all had consistent volume levels.

Right from day one of my involvement in the project, I wanted to repeat the success we had with the Scarface game in terms of post production time allotted after Beta so we could take time to polish and finesse the game’s sound with everything in place. Sound Alpha and Sound Beta dates were established with the project managers to occur two weeks after both production Alpha and Beta.

It was also always the plan to use the newly constructed 7.1 post-production mix suite at Radical Entertainment, which had recently been set up and calibrated by THX, as the ideal location for the final mix of the 50 Cent game, taking full advantage of the inter-studio sharing between Vivendi studios.

The studio had been designed from the ground up to not only handle the mix of internal projects at Radical, but also to accommodate private VPN based projects from other studios. Audio Lead Mark Willott flew out from Birmingham to Vancouver to join me for the final two week post-production audio phase on the project during August of 2008.

The post-production plan that we followed allowed for a week of sound effects replacement, during which we played through the entire game, flagged priority sound effects that we felt could be improved and used Radical’s in-house sound designer, Cory Hawthorne, to re-work any sounds that we needed to replace.

After a week of sound replacement, we moved on to a week of mixing for the Xbox 360. One of the unique aspects of mixing video games is that, as there are no standards in place for reference level mixing and monitoring, as there are in movie post production, most of the competitive games are of dramatically varying output levels.

It was decided that we wanted to mimic the output levels that Gears of War had used, as this was the game we had been most closely modeling in terms of gameplay and target audience.

To this end we attempted to get our output levels as close to Gears of War as possible, listening at slightly underneath the -79dB reference level as we mixed and referencing the output surround waveforms generated by the game, generally this is somewhat quieter than we would prefer to mix a game, but it matched the expectations of the audience for this kind of game.

As well as matching cinematic levels with those of in-game sounds, much of the actual in-game interactive mixing involved ducking out explosions, ambience, music and physics sounds whenever important dialogue was installed. This was achieved via the installation of mixer snapshots that are triggered to coincide with the event in the game, and then un-installed on event completion.

After playing through and mixing the entire game in surround, final checking of the stereo and mono down-mix was achieved using the Studio Technologies Model 79 monitor controller built into the mix studio’s console desk.

Finally, after mixing the Xbox we cloned all the mix settings for the PS3 version of the game and tweaked a few levels for the discreet PCM 7.1 mix output. The game had been running in 7.1 all through development on the PC, so there was very little extra work to do in order to support the two extra channels required for the PS3.

Missed Opportunities

There are always sacrifices to be made as production deadlines loom closer, and there were a few features and areas of content that we could have improved given more time.

We did plan to record a significant amount of new and replacement revision lines for the game with 50 Cent and the G-Unit. We managed to get these pickups recorded with all of our actors except the G-Unit in the end, purely due to scheduling conflicts and requirements which meant that we needed to cut off our content implementation before we could get any of the new assets.

This is one of the areas that we all felt the quality of the game’s dialogue assets could have been improved, offering tighter integration with the events of the level designers. In the end, what is in the game could certainly have been improved, but is still of high enough quality that we were happy we could complete development on the title.

In terms of music, some of the features were very late at going into our code. Beat-mapping that would allow us to transition the Swizz Beatz score on the exact beat was very late going into the game, but an essential feature that needed to go in.

One feature that we did have to drop was random selection of parts within a looping track which we had to forgo due to the risks involved with introducing new FMOD code updates into our Alpha build.

As such, it was designated as something that we didn’t need to have in order to ship the game, and so rather than have randomly looping parts with each track, we simply had a single .wav track made up of the four previous random parts.

Given these slight improvements and missed opportunities, the whole audio team is very happy with the final game we shipped, especially given the pressure to deliver quality in a high-profile license IP such as this. I’d like to extend my personal thanks and congratulations to everyone in Birmingham, LA and Vancouver who worked on the audio and helped to create a great sounding hip-hop game.

Cory would create several versions of each new sound, each with an identical memory footprint to the sound that was being replaced, and we would then try it out in the game. More often than not we would decide on one of those replacements there and then to be the new sound.

Full article at Gamasutra

Check this fantastic article given by Rob Bridgett, called “Post-production sound: a new production model for interactive media”.

One of the most profound differences between film sound design and game sound design is that where film contains linear visual footage against which any number of sounds can be synchronized and blended, a game triggers individual sounds based on events occurring in the game at non-specified times. Broadly speaking, films are about emotional immersion within a narrative, where video games concern physical immersion in a universe of action and reaction. Games therefore require a radically different production philosophy from that of film, yet one that replicates the involvement of a dedicated audio post-production phase at the end of the project. This period would allow consideration of all the elements of music, dialogue and sound effects as fully integrated parts of the final game. Post-production sound design and mixing are therefore where video games can finally begin to articulate themselves with a similar sound design language to that of filmvideo game sound post-production interactive media interactive mixing next-generation sound design.

[Download Post-production sound: a new production model for interactive media (11 pages)]

Let’s read one of the best articles of Rob Bridgett, called: Hoollywood Sound.

Rob Bridgett:

These three features for Gamasutra were written at a point on the production of the Scarface game where my thinking about how the worlds of game audio and movie sound could intersect began. At that time the industry had already seen movie sound personnel working very well on music in games, similarly in terms of voice over actors. Surround sound technologies and standards were also being represented in home theatre and video game soundtracks were leveraging this technology that had been put into people’s homes through advent of DVD, and now Bluray and HD audio.

This piece is in extended exploration of how the worlds of game sound and film sound are intersecting in terms of production. These three articles each deal with one of the main areas of game audio and go into some detail, along with interviews, about the working practices of movie and game sound practitioners. Looking back, I think the piece describes an art form and production practice that has already found ways to appropriate and cross pollinate content from other media.

There are three parts, too extensive to publish it just one post, so you can read the article online, or download it as a .PDF file.

Part 1 — [Online] [Download]

Part 2 — [Online] [Download]

Part 3 — [Online] [Download]