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MillimeterWorkflow Evolution
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
As the tools for video-game audio get more sophisticated, the sound gets more complex and the workflow has to adapt.
On Richard Garritt’s Tabula Rasa, Tracy Bush, director of audio at NCsoft in Austin, Texas, and team recorded foley-style sound effects using digital recorders running at 96kHz and a Nagra Audio four-track analog deck.
Tracy Bush, director of audio at game developer NCsoft in Austin, Texas, has a trick he uses to get game audio its due, bandwidth-wise, early in the developmental process of titles. “At the beginning of each project, I ask for everything — everything,” he says. “I want speed-of-light sound physics; I want Doppler on everything that moves.” He pauses, then adds, “I never get everything I ask for, but I get enough to make it a decent-sounding game.”
Video games are now bigger than the film business, the industry video-game developers putatively mimic in their workflow: Scripting, preproduction, editing, sound effects, postproduction, and a final layback are milestones in both domains. However, game-audio professionals will point out that games are very much their own animals.
“With movies, you have a locked picture and a linear experience — the viewer experiences that world in exactly the way the director intended it to be viewed,” says Nick LaMartina, sound designer at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment in Mesa, Ariz. “In games, I compare it to preparing to do a massive live show, and you have to write instructions for an intern about how to react to every possible thing that could happen under any possible circumstance, then flipping a switch and hoping it all goes OK. Game audio has to be ready to deal with any number of possibilities in even the simplest games. That's why a good, logical workflow is important in creating the sound for the game.”
