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With the massed customers for Xbox and PC games waiting to judge your work, it’s important that Microsoft Games Studios gets the audio right.
For Kristofor Mellroth that means re-assessing the developer’s production cycle and its relationship with external suppliers. PAUL MAC reports.
The nature of compiling audio for games and
integrating that into the game itself means that
the development team has to find room both
for creative thinking and supreme organisation.
What starts out as a group of great ideas can
quickly turn into an irretrievable, tangled splodge
of parameters, loss of coherent inheritance,
multiplied waste of both in-game
and development resources, and –
ultimately – a compromise of the
product’s quality.
To ease this, Kristofor Mellroth (Audio
Director and Sound Design Supervisor
at Microsoft Games Studios in the US)
has instigated a new development
‘pipeline’ (production flow) that is
designed to head off any possibility
of a development descending into
chaos. The main weakness in entirely
concurrent content conception, creation,
and implementation is that events, sounds, and
code are being constantly introduced, modified,
and re-modified, which leads to confusion. The fix
is a return to basics, and an investment in better
foundations.
Paper Play
Mellroth explained that everything will now start
with a piece of paper. The events, the variables
that are carried with those events, plus the sounds
and their component parts, will be discussed,
planned, and specified. Once that plan has been
signed off, then you start on ‘placeholder’ sounds,
auditioning the events, and making sure that the
middleware implementation of the sound system
is well organised. When they’re happy with that
stage, the programmers can come in and hook up
the game to the audio – make the links between
game events and the audio engine, complete with
all the desired variables. The game can then be
tested, with sounds in place.
With asset names firmed up, events connected
correctly, and a well-organised hierarchy of audio
objects, it’s time to revisit the sound design. Sounds
can now simply be created, imported, and tested
in-game in a very rapid design and audition cycle
– and more importantly, Sound Designers can do
what they do best, without creating a new problem
every time they create a new sound.
A film analogy might be that the mix is done
with temp sounds in place, then the mix is handed
to the sound designers to create content to fit the
mix. In that context it sounds a little odd, but it suits
game land perfectly because the mix is not fixed,
so sounds have to adapt constantly. It’s the essence
of event-based working.
Mellroth’s point though is that the analogy
48
works even better when you consider the roles
of the mixer and the sound designers in film
production. Sound designers agonise over the
details, while the mixer looks after the product
as a whole. Mellroth’s idea is to make the same
distinction between implementation and sound
design in game audio. This then opens the door to
using specialists in their fields – get a car
sound specialist to get car sounds and fit
them to the game, for example; not the
other way around. “We see outsourcing
as a very big part of our future,” says
Mellroth, “But what we want out of an
outsourcing partner is for someone to
be the best at something… it’s great
to have a minor in something, but you
should definitely have a major… The
expectations for these games are just as
high as movies now.”
There are variations in the way
Microsoft Games uses out-source partners,
depending on a number of variables. In some cases
it is simply commissioned sound design, but in
others it can be varying degrees of both sound
design and implementation. One partnership that
Mellroth values as a recent and rare find is a pair
of freelancers, working as a single unit: “There’s
one guy who’s an implementation specialist
and he doesn’t do sound design; and the other
guy is a sound designer and he doesn’t do
implementation… they work as a brain collective.”
While there are gains to be had from more
permanent staff, it would be impractical for
Mellroth to hire enough sound designers to cover a
project and still have them on the books during the
downtime. Mellroth: “…On Fable 2, we had a total
of probably 15 sound designers contributing to the
sounds on it… I couldn’t hire 15 sound designers, it
would be impossible.”
Learn The Language
There is still a gulf between the traditional ‘linear’
world and the world of game sound that is not so
difficult to fix. If you want to be a viable service
provider to the games industry, it’s best to be
fluent in the language of games, and in the tools
that dominate the developer desktops. One
straightforward route in is through familiarity with
middleware – it teaches the underlying structures
and challenges faced by developers. Mellroth
agrees: “It’s definitely something we look for,
and there are actually very few people out there,
having just done this search, who are sufficiently
proficient with middleware tools that we could
just let them run wild on a project.”
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START PLAYING
The two main third-party middleware products are
currently FMOD from Firelight Technologies (www.fmod.
org) and Wwise from audiokinetic (www.audiokinetic.
com). Both companies have free downloads of the core
software and freely available sample material to start
working with, so there’s no excuse for not engaging with
games audio. You may even find them inspiring as a
useful new way to approach more general sound design
tasks.
The main Wwise components, Wwise, Wwise Motion,
Firelight Technologies' FMOD Designer.
and Wwise SoundSeed are available on an evaluation basis for free, for PC, from the audiokinetic site, as well as the
example games AK Cube and Zorsis, and example projects. The audiokinetic video tutorials are particularly enlightening
- definitely recommended viewing if you’re interesting in
games audio.
The main FMOD application is FMOD Designer
(authoring) with FMOD Sandbox (audition tool), available as
a free download for a variety of platforms, as well as extras
including tutorial files and Designer example material. An
example iPhone game is scheduled for release as part of the
FMOD education materials, in June.
Both packages can be used for free as long as you’re not
using them on ‘commercial’ or ‘for profit’ projects. Please
see the licensing and sales information for each on their
respective websites.
Audiokinetics' Wwise application.
AUDIOMEDIA MAY 2009