Peter is an Audio Designer with game developer, Torus.
What do you do?
An audio designer is involved in the various stages of the audio development process within the games life cycle.
It includes designing systems that operate the game audio. It means finding how to actually get the actual sounds to play at certain times. I'm managing the software and the contacts for the company to outsource the audio. I also liaise with the composers and the actual guys that write the audio assets. I do a bit of editing with those guys, and direct the audio to fit in with the game design.
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.
