What do you do?
Generally, we’ll start with the written design
document for the game and try and work out
what we have to accomplish for the audio. Sometimes
we might start on the music first, depending on whether
we are providing the music. Often we will wait till
we get early builds of the game, which might be very
very early versions of the level with only a couple
of characters and very very sparsely populated levels.
But we need that visual clue to work out exactly what
it is we will need to provide in terms of audio.
You can look at your documents and concept art and
try and make sound based on that, but I found that you
can often interpret things incorrectly that way. You
can use that as a starting point, but quite often you
have to see how it will actually be implemented in the
game to get the context correct.
There are three ways you can come up with sound effects.
The easiest way and what a lot of people like to do
is to use library sound effects. There
are thousand and thousands of pre-recorded sound effects
already to go that sometimes require very little effort
to get them ready for the game.
The next way is to take those sounds as a starting
point and mix them together, which
is what we do for most of the sounds we use from the
library. You mix them together, you tweak them, you
edit them until they are just exactly what you need
both in terms of the aesthestics of the sound and the
technical limitations of the game. You can’t just
put a sound straight in because you have to worry about
your memory and how it’s going to load. The third
way is to actually go and create the sound
yourself, which can be using a synthesizer, or quite
often taking a microphone out into the real world and
recording real-world sounds.
How did you get to where you are today?
Luck and perseverance.
When I started in the early 90s there was almost no
industry in Australia. I happened to know two people
who were working on a ‘shareware’ game,
which was a popular way of distributing games at the
time, and basically I did work for them on and off for
about six or seven years before they formed Krome studios.
And then when they formed Krome they said they needed
an audio guy inhouse and we’d like it to be you.
I had done a lot of work, but this is my first in-house
full position. Before that it was a lot of freelance
with lots of downtime in between and doing other jobs
to make ends meet.
What skills are necessary for you
to do your job?
A good ear. It’s really down
to being creative and having a good
ear. You can study things at the School of Audio Engineering
or the Conservatorium of Music if you are going to go
more toward the music area of it. But a lot of the skills
and the way we do things in video games are different
to the way they do it in film, or the way you would
do it in a music production, or radio production. So
quite often you either learn the skills making games,
or you don’t. There is no course that tells you
exactly how to put sound into a game because every game
company will do it differently.
It used to be that there was a sound guy and he would
do the music and he would provide the sound effects.
These days with the games becoming so expansive you
really can’t be a one-man band, so you might have
one person working on the music and a team of people
working on the sound effects, and other people working
on audio for the voices. It’s always good if you
are a musician but you might end up in a job, and that’s
where most of the sound jobs are in this country, where
you do not ever touch music. You are given the music
by someone else and you put it in the game.
If you’re a musician and that’s what your
heart is bent on. you might find a sound design job
a little restricting. But there are other people who
do music and they do it in their own time; they might
be musicians at home and they work in graphics. But
if your heart is set on being a musician, you definitely
need good skills as a musician, or compositional skills,
versatility, playing ability – you do need a lot
of skills from various disciplines in order to write
music successfully for video games. It is its own art
form.
How important was your education/training?
Almost none of it was related to my training. I did
study at the School of Audio Engineering back in the
early nineties, but the technology has moved on so far
in fifteen years that the equipment I use now bears
almost no relation to what was around then. Not having
a degree or certificate will not prevent you from getting
into a job in games now if your portfolio is good enough.
Where do you see your career going?
I would tie my career to the health of the company
I work at. I’m pretty much where I want to be
at the moment. If our games that we work on get bigger
and more recognised and better known, then I see that
as my best avenue for creative growth in my chosen field.
What advice would you give to someone
wanting to enter the games industry?
Firstly, make sure you love games
to start with. We have found that if you are not really
into games you might find it very difficult to understand
why things are done certain ways, because unlike a movie
which is a fixed entity where sounds fall in the same
spot video games are interactive and there are multiple
ways of achieving that same sound say of a glass breaking
or a door opening in a video game as opposed to the
way you would do it in a film.
The last time I had to hire people we advertised. I
know the audio jobs don’t always come up often
but I have seen them advertised fairly regularly recently.
The thing that always impresses me is when I get a show
reel where they take something that looks like
it could be a video game and made sound for it. You
might have a friend who is an animator and they put
together a show reel and they might need some really
good sound effects and music to make the show reel come
alive. A lot of people pooh-pooh the idea of doing work
for someone for free, but then it canalso be your show
reel, to prove to people what you can do.
Another good way is if you’ve worked in video
games before. There are lots of volunteer projects
out there, such as ‘mods’
for existing games which require sound and music and
they are a great way to get a grounding in how games
are put together. To actually have an interactive show
reel to show someone ‘ah yeah I’ve actually
worked on games and this is what I’ve done’.
If I was to hire now, I would not be looking at where
they studied – that does not interest me. I might
look at what they’ve done previously. I would
look at their show reel, and if what was on the show
reel was what I was looking for (that had been advertised),
then I would probably ask to speak to them.
A lot of people don’t read a job ad properly.
It might say ‘I need a sound assistant’
and you get three CDs full of music! You need to make
sure when someone advertises for something, you may
have skills that aren’t perfect for it but they
may be peripheral and yet very useful.
Sometimes people work who in Flash animation
can have skills that are very similar to what you need
in video games, whereas someone who has worked on the
Matrix may have skills that are very impressive for
working in feature films, but irrelevant for working
in video game. |
