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!

Hearing Voices

Was having a discussion with the audio programmer yesterday, and we had a moment of commiseration on the prevalence of voice over in current-gen games.

VO, done correctly, can certainly add a lot to a game - not the least being making it more 'movie-like', which seems to the ambition of a great many games developers.  But I'm growing ever more of the opinion that the payoff is not commensurate to the cost.  VO can be a hugely expensive endeavour, particularly if you're hiring big-name actors.  On top of that cost is the extra manpower required to implement, test, localise - and we can't forget the game memory it takes, particularly on older hardware.  That's memory taken away from sound effects, music, and potentially a whole range of other assets.

But is it really worth it, when hardly anyone is going to sit through the character telling you what button to press?  I guarantee you the vast majority of players will be reading the text and skipping it before it's halfway through.  I certainly do, sometimes even on games with voices I really like.

It seems at times that nearly every game I've worked on winds up having voice over everywhere. The characters will exchange witticisms at every point in their journey, taunt their opponents, encourage their friends, react to every obstacle or event.  This is not even including shops, or cutscenes, and let's not forget the last-minute monster that is tutorials.  

If you implement every bit of it, your characters become chatterboxes who don't shut up for more than five seconds.  They're talking over music, over sound effects, over action.  How many action movies have the hero delivering one liners every second time he does something?  Wait, scratch that - how many good action movies?  

This will also get repetitive very very quickly - and if it's a frequent enough action, no number of variations (more expense) will rescue it.  

Sometimes, with sound design, what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in.  It should be okay to have moments of silence.  Those moments lend more dynamics to your mix - they make the moments of frenzied cacophony have so much more impact.

Some food for thought.  The trend is unlikely to go away soon.  But I hope in the future we will be able to exercise restraint with voice over, much in the same way games have to learned to restrain themselves with bloom and coloured lighting.

Soundtrack To Life

Something very cool about walking home with a clear view of the full moon and Clint Mansell’s Moon soundtrack playing in your MP3 player.

Upcoming Eminence Concert!

I have mentioned before that I am a regular stalker of Eminence - an Australia-based orchestra specialising in performing music from anime and video games.  Their performances are unparalleled, and they regularly bring in absolutely A-list guest composers.  Essentially, in the relatively small corner of the world that is Australia, they are a godsend to games and anime music fans long-resigned to their jealousy of the events held overseas.

Thus, I come with great news!  After a year of silence, Eminence is returning to Sydney to perform Memories of Fantasia on July 16 as part of the SMASH! anime convention at the Sydney Exhibition Centre.

There's no news on a setlist as of yet, but based on the title it is very likely to be a rehash of previous Nights of Fantasia.  This is not a bad thing.  I have my fingers crossed for an encore showing of Secret of Mana's Meridian Dance.

As a side note, Eminence badly needs help with their marketing.  Not even a  mention on their website!  This is the second concert is a row I've discovered through purely accidental means.  I am upset at your lack of advertising, Eminence.

Feet, and the Sounds They Make

There's a fantastic long-term thread of discussion running on footstep sound implementation in games going on here:  

http://www.gameaudioforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2014

Every sound designer working in games should definitely give it a gander at some point.  It's one of the basics that rarely gets much thought or attention, and is in fact often considered something of a chore, like the grocery shopping of sound design.  Some people, of course, elect to simply eat out, while others go shopping at the fanciest deli in town.  It's fascinating to read all the great justification behind all the different preferences and viewpoints.

I myself belong to the school of thought that footsteps should be very low in the mix and inaudible 90% of the time.  To paraphrase one of the posters that put it best, in real life you only really notice footsteps when:

1.Staring at your feet

2.Wearing hard soled shoes on a ceramic or tile floor

3.When someone's wearing high heels

4.In the snow (marshes/mud/puddles would also apply here I expect)

5.On a catwalk (though truthfully, that's more the catwalk's movement than the foot impact)

6.If there's a squeak or some other audible abnormality in the shoes

7.When running

Only half of those are likely to apply in any given game - and I would even argue that running footsteps, depending on how far back the camera is, could be done away with.  Of course, you have to take into account a lot of other influencing factors such as gameplay and style and overall mix.

But for NPCs especially, I think the mix works better with no footsteps (again with the exceptions, barring oversized NPCs).  It's valuable memory (and voices) spent on something you'd want to mix out of existence as soon as more than two NPCs wander into the vicinity, or anything happens at all.

If you're lucky enough to be working on a game with ninjas, of course, the point is moot.  :)

Advertising An Audio App for Android Alliteratively

Pimping this Android app for our awesome audio programmer at work.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.singlecellsoftware.caustic&feature=search_result

It is, as some of the comments say, like having Reason in your pocket.  Definite value for money here.

...Lately I mostly seem to be using this blog to shill links.

Stealing Like An Artist

Wanted to share this cool link.  It’s for artists, really, but I think it applies to sound designers too – there’s just as much art as there is science and technology to our work.

http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/

Otherwise, very busy at work.  No matter what you try in order to get ahead, the sound work always explodes at the end of a project, you just can't get around the conundrum of late design changes and everyone else doing their final implementations at the last minute.  Consequently, I am not allowed to get sick/injured/experience creative block for the next three months.