What do you do?
The games designer comes up with some ideas on how
to present audio. Then I formulate the systems and sometimes
a bit of coding to put those systems together. I have
to make sure the game designer and the composer are
on the same level. I also need to make sure that the
audio composers have the latest software and the latest
tools they need in order to get the job done as best
as they can.
A typical day? At this stage of the current game project,
we’re wrapping up, so mostly it’s just finalising
where sound should play, which pieces of music should
play for what areas of the game. At the moment I’m
actually talking to the company that produce the audio
software so that for the next round of projects we have
the latest tools.
How did you get to where you are today?
It’s a funny story actually. When Torus was just
starting, there were only about six or seven people.
I was just an 18 year old kid who really wanted to be
in the games industry and I had this idea of all the
fame and fortune that comes along with it. I actually
came and did work experience at Torus for free. I was
writing programs and doing a bit of composition at the
time.
At Torus I started working on a 3D engine for a space
flight game. I just worked on that on the PC and then
Bill the boss here said ‘well can you do anything
on the Game Boy?’ So I put together snakes on
the Snakes game, and he goes ‘ah that’s
alright’. I hadn’t actually done any Gameboy
coding in my life. It was just a coincidence that it
all so quickly fell into place. And he said ‘well
looks like you’ve got a job here’, and I
was like, ‘my God! It’s unbelievable. I’m
now working in the games industry! Eighteen years old
- it was a big thing.
I’ve always had an interest in audio. I had a
keyboard at home and always had a knack for music. I
actually work with another friend of mine in a business
where we produce music and get contracts for playing
at festivals and music production.
What skills are necessary for you
to do your job?
A good understanding of the audio world,
and tools that are available and how
things are put together.
You also need very good communication skills
to be able to discuss things with different types of
people -- a games designer has a very different language
to a composer. Also a technical understanding of how
the computer runs audio - how code can best be designed
to actually get the audio into the game.
In film, audio comes as a linear stream in the end.
With games, it’s a non-linear thing.
Any sound can be played at any time. You don’t
really have that much control over the flow of sounds
playing, so you require a specific system that will
allow a game event – like a footstep or a sword
swinging, or somebody’s voice over – to
trigger the right piece of audio.
The actual limitations are usually based on the console
- the amount of memory that you can store and the resolution
that the audio can play in. You need to make sure that
multiple consoles can be supported with the same source
assets, which can be quite a challenge when you are
trying to go from 48 Khz (full resolution file) to 24
Khz in order to fit them in the memory. So trying to
manage that is quite difficult, but it gets together.
At Torus, we create the sounds ourselves and have contributed
them to a library. But we also have
a lot of third party audio libraries that we use to
put together sounds. We can use them straight out of
the box, or we can combine them with other sounds in
order to make a cumulative effect. So there is a very
large set of musical instruments and sounds and all
kind of things like that.
How important was your education/training?
Any kind of formal education helps. It helps to understand
how to learn. Whether its from an audio background or
a computing background, or a combination of the two,
any formal education definitely helps you.
Where do you see your career going?
Personally, my job as an Audio designer is a subset
of what I do. If you were to focus primarily on Audio
design, then the best step forward would be into overall
Game Design. Having personally done work as Lead and
senior programming on various other projects, a combination
of all of these skills gives me a good understanding
of the overall system and how it functions.
What advice would you give to someone
wanting to enter the games industry?
It’s pretty simple. Just don’t give up.
If you’ve got an idea and you want to keep going
with it, just keep trying and you’ll eventually
get there.
With audio, just write music and bring that in to a
games company.
You need to communicate that you understand
the technical workings of audio and
the various tools. In your resume, you need to list
that you know how to use the things you’ve used
before. And then if you don’t, just go out and
learn things like Logic on the Mac and Q-Base on the
PC – they are great tools to get an understanding
of how to compose on a computer. With those kinds of
tools you put together a piece of music, and you can
do that for a composition.
Or if you want to write a game that is based on audio,
you could get a few audio assets together and come up
with an idea of a bouncing a ball using physics with
a different sounds playing at a different volume and
pitches based on the velocity of the collision against
the world. It would be an easy way to communicate to
people that you have an understanding of the physics,
mathematics, programming and of audio. |
