Fun and Games

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Nick Peck

Attitude Adjustment

As with many jobs, interpersonal skills are enormously important. Years ago, during a casual conversation, a highly successful video-game executive tossed off a saying that has stayed with me: “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Everything about being a successful game-audio pro is encapsulated in those five words.

Talented, knowledgeable contributors are so plentiful as to seemingly grow on trees. A good attitude differentiates the successful candidate. Life is too short to deal with arrogance, with prima donnas, or with people who backstab or belittle. I love to hear “Can do,” but I am just as happy hearing “I don't know if I can do it, but I'll look into it and get back to you quickly.” My golden rule for game-audio success is, “Do what you say you are going to do, when you say you are going to do it, with a minimum of drama.”

Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) sound-design manager Ken Felton looks for the basics in a potential hire. “Have good communication skills,” he advises. “Use a spell-checker. Wear clean clothes. Be polite. Show up on time. It's pretty simple.”

Tools of the Trade

Whether your goal is to be an employee or a freelancer, you should have and thoroughly understand several basic tools. One required tool is a computer, of course. You can use a Macintosh or a Windows PC to create content, but PCs are usually required for audio-integration tasks. EARS audio director Paul Gorman and I use Macs for production and PCs for integration. On the other hand, Jim Diaz, a senior sound designer at Activision's Underground Development studio, uses Windows PCs for both asset creation and integration.

Digidesign Pro Tools (see Fig. 4) is the DAW of choice for virtually every game- and film-audio professional I have spoken with. Simply put, you must learn how to use it.

If your focus is on composition, you will probably need some specialized music-production software as well. Griskey employs Apple Logic Pro for composition and Sibelius Software's Sibelius scoring software for notation. He also uses most of the major orchestral sound libraries.

Similarly, sound designers require additional tools of the trade, notably a field recorder, microphones, and a couple of general-purpose sound-effects libraries to help fill the gaps in your personal, custom library. (For a comparative roundup of field recorders, see “Playing the Field” in the October 2005 issue of EM.) Gorman also points out the importance of having “a neutral, balanced listening environment where you design assets and listen to them in the game.”

Let's assume that you've worked on your content-creation, integration, and interpersonal skills and that you've put together a studio where you've mastered the technology. You are ready to rock. Now it's time to get your demo reel together, network with everyone you know, watch the job-board postings (www.gamasutra.com is a good place to start), and be ready for that crucial interview. If you follow the suggestions I've made and you have the talent, that gig is as good as yours.

Of course, you have to find the gigs first. Fortunately, several of the major game companies, such as Electronic Arts and Sony Computer Entertainment of America, post job information on their Web sites (see Fig. 5).

A Day in the Life

Now that you've settled on a career in game audio, what can you expect? What is a typical day in the life? The answer is that there is rarely a “typical” day; a variety of challenges crop up, and which issues you deal with depends on your position and the phase of project development.

Content creation and integration are certainly part of your day, and the lower you are on the totem pole, the larger the proportion of your day you spend on these creative tasks. As you rise through the ranks of responsibility, more of your time is spent managing people and resources, going to meetings with people in other disciplines who work on their aspects of the game, and evaluating the content created by your team as it makes its way into the game.

For example, as of this writing, David Collins and Paul Gorman each supervise the work of ten content creators for their current games (Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and The Simpsons, respectively). That is the same-size crew that you would see handling audio on a feature film. Different types of tasks often take precedence at various stages of development. As a sound designer, I always set aside time for field recording at the beginning of a project so that we have a new library of raw content to work with.

Jim Diaz likes to break a game project's development cycle into three phases: spotting (or preproduction), production, and postproduction. The spotting phase is filled with meetings where the audio team learns about the project. Lists of audio assets are created and stored in databases. Members of the team work out preliminary development schedules and approach potential contractors.

The primary sound-effects design and music composition take place during the production phase. The team creates and integrates assets, slowly filling the new virtual world with sound as the game levels are created.

Postproduction is filled with volume tweaks, sound-effects revisions, bug fixes, and playing the game over and over while polishing the soundtrack to a high shine. Eventually, the game is ripped from our clutches, packaged, and placed on store shelves.

The Freelance Perspective

Freelancers spend a good portion of their day creating content, but again, that is only the first of their tasks. Mark Griskey and Julian Kwasneski (founder of independent game-audio firm Bay Area Sound, Inc.) work remotely, so they exchange a lot of information via email. As contractors, they must send invoices for work completed, create quotes for prospective projects, and iron out technical implementation details. The all-important schedule must be continually managed and updated.

Once the development team starts hearing the audio in the game, the feedback process begins, with inevitable revision requests that must be managed. You have to maintain a delicate balance here: feedback is critically important, and you have to allocate time for revisions within the development schedule or you will quickly become double booked, trying to revisit old content while creating new materials simultaneously.

As an audio director, I believe there is an art to delivering feedback along these lines. I recommend that audio directors maintain a single line of communication with the freelancer, always keep their eye on the schedule, and know when something is good enough. Of course, this process is made much easier when working with high-caliber freelancers, such as Kwasneski and Griskey, who routinely hit the ball out of the park the first time around.

In the recent past, out-of-house freelancers were relegated to content-creation duties only, because the asset-integration tasks often relied on custom solutions that required being on-site. These days, though, freelancers are being used for integration as well.

Ken Felton prefers all-in-one sound-design contracts, where the freelancer provides the assets prebundled into sound banks that drop right into the game. Collins has a current off-site contractor who does nothing but asset integration. This development style can be excellent for freelancers who have highly developed studios and prefer to work off-site. Griskey, for example, lives in a tiny, remote beach town in Northern California and handles the vast majority of his business dealings via the Internet.