Working in a Department VS Working Solo

With the recent resurgence of small indie development teams and a renewed burst of entrepreneurship in games, lately I've been hearing a lot of people espousing the virtues of working solo.  First and foremost, that you have complete creative control over your piece.  The autonomy and freedom involved are also compelling arguments to going it alone.

These are all definitely true.  However, I thought I'd share a different perspective for the sake of balancing the argument.  

In the past, I've always been privileged to work in a fully-staffed audio department with other sound designers.  The most obvious and immediate benefit of this was the ability to split the work and borrow designers on a project during the inevitable tail-heavy end of a game's development.  Ironically, the time when most other departments are focusing on polish and bug-fixing is the window when audio are usually at their busiest - the myriad of 'polish' changes almost inevitably carry changes for or break existing sound, in addition to the catch-up audio has to play on all the assets that were finished in the 11th hour of alpha.  This is also typically the time when cutscenes and FMV video are finished, when localisation audio starts arriving, and somewhere in the middle of all this you have to do the final mix.  With games typically getting larger and larger, with more assets, more physics, more voice and more music, it's no longer so easy to manage this on your own.  You can compensate by doing as much pre-mixing and polish as possible in the early stages of the project, but there is a limit to what you can achieve with that, too.

This is where being able to bring on other sound designers for a last sprint is a huge boon - with most assets already made, a quick induction to the audio style of the game is all that's necessary to get a hand on bug-fixing and implementation and mixing, meaning you can sometimes squeeze in some polish that you wouldn't manage otherwise.

That's an obvious advantage.  The less tangible benefits you don't often notice until they're not there any more.

The most vital of these being, I feel - fresh sets of ears.

It's a well-documented phenomenon that your ears 'get used' to certain sounds after a while. You can stop noticing even obviously incorrect or poorly-mixed sounds, because your brain has made the association after repeated exposure and things start sounding 'right'.  It can be hard to reset this - taking a break is usually the best solution, which isn't really possible during alpha and beta when there are deadlines everywhere.  And much like an artist who has been working on an incredibly complex canvas, after a while it's very easy for your ears to have become so accustomed listening for details that it's hard to step back and listen to the big picture.  Like with artists, sometimes it helps just to have someone point these things out.

Unfortunately, I've found that sometimes people can be reluctant to give negative feedback in an area they don't feel qualified in.  It's an understandable sentiment, though an unfortunate one.  Other sound designers are much less likely to hold back. 

Continuing on, while you may have complete creative control over a project, you're also losing the benefit of a diversified skill set.  Rare is the sound designer who is equally brilliant in all fields.  I've met a great many who are excellent at music but lack the light touch for subtle foley.  I've met some who are stunning at ambience but frequently get stumped when working on abstract UI sounds. Others are brilliant at mixing but weaker at asset creation.  Some can work wonderfully in gritty realistic styles but struggle with arcade or cartoon, or vice versa.  Most will be competent enough at all fields to get by but the improvement rendered by collaborating with those with a knack in a diverse range of specialities is enormous.  It's the same sort of quality you get when you can bring in a lightning specialist, a texture artist and a modeller to a level mesh, as compared to having the mesh artist do the whole lot (even if they can).  Not to mention, such diversity is a great vehicle for learning, raising the skills of all the designers involved.

Still, the above point does push a designer out of their comfort zone - as much as such collaboration can lead to improvement and be used as an opportunity for learning, it can also become a crutch.  Luckily, most sound designers, by nature of the way we develop interest in the craft (just ask any random sound designer how they first started learning about sound), tend to be autodidacts, so working alone is unlikely to cause stagnation.  But it is always harder to learn and improve in a vacuum of feedback.

In the end, I think the pros and cons to working alone versus working in a studio or audio department probably stack up fairly equal.  Although we'll see if I still feel the same after seeing out my first completely solo major project.  Wish me luck!