What do you do?
Sound design encompasses all the sound audio that you can hear in the game. We handle creation and implementation of music, sound effects, and voices. Some of what we do gets provided to us by publishers - sometimes the music is provided to us and the voices for the games are generally recorded by the publishers, but we do create stuff in house quite often.
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 games.
