Hardly a week goes by without news of updates to key technologies at the heart of game development. With this quick pace of change and the broad span of development timelines, developers are bound to find themselves in a technical, team-level pickle at some unexpected point before their games reach launch.
Technical sound design is a great example where sudden changes to the backend technology at play can mean a world of difference in how our work gets done. For this reason, it’s important for developers to prepare their audio implementation setups with adaptability in mind from the very onset of game development. Developers looking to strengthen their audio pipelines against technological disruption should keep the following considerations in mind.
Ditch the Creative Divide
The typical game audio workflow can be simplified into two halves: asset creation and implementation. While music and sound designers have an endless variety of interchangeable tools to draw upon to conjure up a library of sounds, the work of technical sound designers must often mold to fit a chosen engine or middleware for the project at hand.
For this reason, it’s easy to fall into a mindset of letting an audio engine’s own shorthand terminology and structure drive implementation at the cost of further design thinking, but creativity in audio does not and should not end with asset creation. For technical sound design to provide maximum impact for our players, we need to promote the role of creativity at the point of implementation, where the processing of all game audio determines how the most immersive game experiences take shape.
Instead of viewing sound design as two ends of a spectrum, with content sound design on one end and technical sound design on the other, we find it better to frame sound design in three parts: Audio Creation, Design Thinking, and Systems Knowledge. Design (i.e. decisionmaking) is the common, equal thread between both music & sound creator and technical sound design roles.
When audio assets pass from sound creators to technical sound designers for engine input, so many decisions need to be made about how each sound is expressed in the game. What are its triggers? Should it be modulated to mask repetition? Will attenuation be helpful to convey the distance or scale of its source? Does a sound fit neatly into a unified system of shared triggers and flavor settings? Each question asked and answered in technical execution is yet another layer of design helping audio take even better shape for our players.
Keep Craft (Not Tech) in Command
Just this June, Epic Games signaled the end of support for visual scripting tool Blueprints in the upcoming Unreal Engine 6. This feature not only made it easier for game developers using Unreal Engines 4 & 5 to engineer audio systems and behaviors without extensive traditional programming expertise, it was also enriched by troves of community-built plug-ins, templates, and more that all helped lower programming barriers to delivering richer technical sound design in games.
Technical sound departments built heavily around specific tools like Blueprints will inevitably face a tough transition ahead in finding new ways to cover the loss of systemic resources. But there’s no comparison in coverage to having audio engineers who understand the universal backend processes that these temporary interfaces repackage for ease.
Think of this problem as though you are a cook who has grown familiar with a shortcut setting on their oven: one that bakes reliably delicious chicken without any fuss. But if that favored appliance suddenly stops working, there’s no guarantee that a new oven will have the same smart feature, nor that a comparable replacement will deliver the precise results you’ve grown to expect. But if you keep their wits and regular cooking know-how about you, you can fall back on a wide variety of preparation methods for serving up a top-tier dish — no quick “Chicken” button required.
With the new Unreal Engine transitioning into Verse, it appears some need for coding knowledge or learning will resurface for native (i.e., in-engine) audio implementation on UE6. As such, if a game audio engineer has spent a lot of time with the shorthand of Blueprints driving their work, it’s crunch time to dust off those DIY skills and refresh oneself on the manual methods that this waning toolset glossed over to prepare for a productive transition.
Involve Technical Audio Teams Early
One of the best ways to minimize disruptions to an audio pipeline is to make sure technical audio teams are involved in key developmental decisions from the start. Not only can technical sound designers advise on the ideal audio engine or middleware at play, we can lay more groundwork for interchangeability should plans change. When technical teams are only involved later in the process, sudden pivots may as well be like starting from scratch.
Another point of early collaborative value comes within the sound design team itself, when technical sound engineers can work with content sound designers and align on pre-implementation production standards, e,g, any audio processing that can be baked directly into the assets versus effects processed on the systems programming side. These decisions can ultimately help keep the burden lighter come any technological transition.
The impending loss of Blueprints is just one example where knowledge of craft, not tool-driven tasks, can help ease unexpected systemic changes. These transitions are often unforeseeable but manageable if audio teams are equipped with true, systemic knowledge to reroute an audio pipeline and achieve similar audio results across alternative interfaces with minimal disruption.
Because technical sound design is still a massively creative role, Unlock Audio houses dedicated technical sound design roles directly within each of our style-driven studios. The technology at play may change, but by leading with craft and passion for specific styles of games not bound to any one engine or middleware, we prime developers with the pivotability to take inevitable technical curveballs in stride.