Before I started working in game development, I was an audio professional in a variety of other disciplines. I was good at what I did, and I knew I was capable of handling myself in any number of situations with audio.
Naturally, I looked at game audio as just another mildly different challenge that I would one day conquer.
But, no matter how I “sold” myself or explained to people in the industry how capable with audio I was – it always felt like there was a wall up. Nobody would hire me, and nobody would tell me why.
It was incredibly frustrating.
I heard regularly phrases like
“Game audio is a completely different animal. It’s not like film, video, or recording music.”
At the time, I thought to myself “how different can it be?!”.
It turns out, a lot different – and not for the reasons that you’re expecting if you’re well-versed in game audio.
The Typical Explanation
Audio for games (or, any interactive media) differs from linear media drastically in a number of ways. The primary differences lie in that word interactive.
Linear media, at most, only has start, stop, and pause buttons.
Interactive media, on the other hand, is entirely user controlled. There are a number of different control schemes and buttons that the user can press to change the environment that they’re in. Each one of those buttons also has different actions depending on context.
Additionally, none of the interactivity has a direct correlation with time – at all.
This induces a number of issues with repetition alone – which doesn’t exist in linear media.
You could also factor in things like acoustic spread in a fabricated 3D space – which linear media doesn’t have to account for.
What about memory, data rates, voice counts, and audio buffers – none of which exist in a movie.
Just solely accounting for user experience – things like repetition, perception of acoustics, 3D space, reverb zones, etc – there’s a ton of audio design decisions that need to be made in an interactive world that rarely need to be considered in something linear for the screen.
So, if you’re doing sound for video or music – take some time to wrap your head around that first. That is a good idea to do if you’re not used to it.
But that’s still not what I’m actually referring to when I say “game audio is a lot different”.
Because, quite frankly, audio design decisions aren’t that mindblowing to me. It’s fairly easy to explain the problems of interactive space to any audio professional – even if it takes time for them to learn to understand how to deal with them.
What I’m actually referring to, however, is the audio professional/sound designer’s worst nightmare.
It’s Software Development
I’m truly surprised, more often than not, at how many lead/director level audio professionals in games don’t understand what business they’re in.
(I’m not going to name people – this isn’t that kind of thing. Instead, I want to try to explain what I find lacking and try to begin to help solve it.)
The fundamental difference between linear media and interactive media – to me – is that the latter is inextricably tied to software development.
In fact, interactive audio is software development.
To me, there’s no way around that.
In linear, you’re making sounds and putting them on a timeline. You’re fudging the sound design to taste and feel. That’s it.
In interactive, you’re doing the same – but at some point, your audio file must enter a software development process.
Your .wav file must get “checked in” to source control.
Your .wav file or sound banks will, at some point, get touched by a software developer.
Your sounds will only play when a software system tells them to – and there’s millions of ways for that to go wrong.
Except I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen audio professionals not understand why. It causes them to become afraid of the process – because the process always seems broken – and then they don’t learn it because they’re afraid to break it too. It also just, seems so complicated.
Plus, code – ugh!
Except, as a game audio professional – to me – this is at least half of your job.
Maybe you spend most of your days dreaming up sound design, creating sounds, and are really focused and enthused about the audio design and creative process. That’s awesome, and that’s totally needed.
But then there’s the part where your sounds get hooked into the system too.
Let me be clear – I’m not saying everyone needs to learn to code or should be a software developer.
I do however, think that you’ll be an infinitely better, more confident, more capable game audio professional if you learn the basic concepts of software development.
Things like:
- How source control works, and how to “diff” files in order to avoid stomping others’ work
- How to use your middleware’s profiler and how to ask for and read console output from your game engine
- The basics of programming – concepts like variables, functions, classes, inheritance, and memory – simply to be able to speak to your teammates well
- What the process of stepping through/debugging code looks like – so you can more accurately describe problems to engineers
- How memory and audio buffers work at an extremely high level – so you understand what your audio system is actually doing
There’s an infinitely large rabbit hole to learn when it comes to software development, and even audio software development.
But it simply boggles my mind when I see individuals working in software development who don’t understand how software development works.
If you have very little idea, for example, why engineers work in different code branches, why they take so long, why your game seems so fragile, why things consistently break, and why it always seems like a miracle that your game even ships – you should ask these questions.
The biggest shocker to me when I landed in game development was, in fact, just how receptive software developers were at answering my really stupid ignorant questions.
What I found is – most people are simply afraid to ask.
I have no idea why. Maybe you’re scared of expressing your ignorance and looking stupid, maybe you just think you don’t have time.
But when you’re creating a product together – you become more valuable to the team as a whole when you take the time to understand as much of the process as possible. It greases the wheels of communication, empathy, and teamwork.
You’ll also be shocked at just how many engineers are willing to come down to your level and explain what a buffer size of 512 samples actually looks like inside of code – and yes, you can see every frame of audio that you’ve always heard about. They’re also usually willing to explain whatever neat DSP tricks they’re working on, or how they’ve manipulated the system to save the game lots of memory because the out-of-the-box middleware ways aren’t always the best for your game.
You know how when you get back from a large convention or a meetup you usually feel excited, jazzed up, and energized because you’ve met and talked to so many like-minded individuals?
If you’re already working on a development team – those people are actually in your office with you right now. They just might not be working on audio.
I encourage you – walk outside your office and strike up a conversation with a team member that you sometimes work with. Maybe it’s an engineer – maybe it isn’t. But just take a minute and ask them about their process.
Ask an artist what they’re working on and to show you 3 minutes of how they do what they do. Ask how it goes into their pipeline and how they get things into the game.
Ask an engineer what problem they’re trying to solve right now, what’s so hard about it, and 3 minutes of their debugging process.
Most importantly – don’t be afraid to ask the stupid questions.
You don’t do what they do – that’s why they’re on your team and you’re not making the project solo.
Take a minute and remember that what you do isn’t just about audio or audio design. In fact, audio design is meant to enhance features in a piece of software.
So go, be a silly audio person, and learn yourself a bit of software development.
I swear, promise, from the bottom of my heart – when your teammates realize that you’re serious, they’ll love you for it, and you’ll work together so much better because of it.
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