About Audio Milestones

Saw this piece on Gamasutra today, it is definitely worth a read, as it's a matter I've complained about many times in the past.

Gamasutra - Opinion: Team Audio VS The Milestone

In my personal experience, another method not mentioned here has been to simply bump the audio requirements for milestone to the next milestone (up until the last one, of course). There are issues with this, however - not least being developers often wanting to 'sell' their current milestone work to the publisher by adding sound. I even worked on a team once where it was common to receive requests to make sounds for assets that didn't exist yet, as a sort of placeholder to cover for them.  Like how cheap animations will sometimes use a still shot of a car careening around a corner and have sound do the work of movement with tyres screeching and engine roaring. This occasionally led to some really awesome developments, where the animator would hear the sound, like it, and then animate to the sound effect.  Much, much, much more often, however, it involved a whole lot of redesign. Which is okay early in the project when you have time to spare, but gets a bit stressful later when you simply don't have the time to redesign sounds.

In that respect, I think the separate 'Audio Milestone' is a pretty good idea... except setting it up like that has the potential to erode any collaboration you can get with the rest of the team as they create their assets.  It's really really easy to become the closeted sound fairy that adds audio to the build you put under the pillow, but the very best sound design comes from working closely with the team, where they can communicate what audio cues they'd like and can in turn meet you halfway in things like firing rates or features or flybys (how much cooler could you make that flyby sound if it were a little slower/faster/came from behind?)

Another way, which has happened more often than not, is that audio doesn't even get included in the milestone schedule. I've never quite figured this one out, but I'll take it as a mark of trust that they believe Team Audio will get it all done in time.