When you think of games with impeccable, award-winning sound design, you know deep in your core that the developer had total alignment on its audio goals even before the first line of code took form. Great game audio comes together much more easily when studios involve representatives of each audio discipline (music, sound design, implementation, and voice) in the earliest stages of pre-production and remain committed to constant audio collaboration throughout the twists and turns of development.
All too often, audio is treated as secondary to art, story, and mechanics, but by delaying these essential contributions developers miss out on huge opportunities for creative teams to inspire each other and for engineers to prepare the smartest frameworks for how your audio interfaces ideally with the final gameplay. Here are some words of advice from members across the Unlock Audio team on why involving audio in pre-production is key to packing a more powerful gameplay punch.
Capture a Coherent and Cohesive Audio Vision – Jason Kanter, Audio Director
Pre-production is an essential stage for involving an audio director who will craft an overall vision for the many audio disciplines based on your game’s features, pillars, and themes. We capture this foresight in an audio vision document that covers voice, sound design, and music and serves as a stylistic and technical guide for developers both in and outside of the audio team.
Without a clear and concise vision of how a game’s soundtrack, dialogue, and sound design all work together, the many disparate pieces may be left to the subjective tastes of the many independent contributors. Regardless of how talented any contributor may be, without somebody to establish a common goal for everyone to strive towards, the audio will lack consistency and cohesion, making it feel somewhat disjointed from the rest of the game and possibly from itself.
Bringing on an audio director later in production means that many decisions will have already been made that directly impact audio. These decisions could mean restricting options that sound design has on how to approach a feature or eliminating a pipeline that could have made a feature more efficient. This late timing also severely limits the opportunities for sound to affect and inform other disciplines working on the game. By bringing an audio director (and sound team) on later, developers miss out on the chance to spark those magical moments of an artist being inspired by an original composition or an animator iterating on a run cycle based on the clomping sound of custom footsteps.
Impactful and Innovative Audio Implementation Starts Early – Adam Brown, Technical Sound Designer
Audio is half of how most players experience a game’s story. It helps communicate how you’re supposed to feel at any given moment and better understand key actions depicted on screen. It also adds depth and intricacy to unseen elements of a game world, helping to sell the players on a time and place.
Technical sound designers are the bridge between creative and development teams who find ways to weave audio in more powerful ways that engage players more deeply in the story or game mechanics. Achieving as much requires a strong technical framework that addresses audio’s many dependencies upfront and gives sound designers more options for creativity in the assets they produce. These essential frameworks take their strongest shape during pre-production and cannot be implemented as easily or painlessly once development is long underway.
If developers establish technical frameworks together with the teams that will be implementing them — with audio as a conscious priority — from the start, we can then build smarter and more efficient audio pipelines that deliver audio faster and with greater impact, resulting in better gameplay experiences. This preparation also provides audio systemization with more opportunity to be scalable, future-proof, and optimized, saving teams from the scramble of hacking prior systems to do something they weren’t originally designed for — ultimately saving devs an immeasurable amount of time, money, and stress.
Make Time for Music at the Top – Thomas Kresge, Composer
Scoring video games is an entirely different beast than composing for movies. With cinema, composers more often begin their work in earnest during post-production (once the beats of the linear film are largely decided and all photography has already been captured). While exploring a movie’s many musical motifs may begin earlier, full-bore composition relies on a more solidified canvas before a score can take form.
Video games, however, are filled with so many interactive variables in their final form that they demand a different, adaptable approach to composition that must plot its first notes as early as pre-production. Aside from overall visions for musical style and tone, composers need to work with engineering teams early to determine how the music and gameplay will intersect and to ensure that the necessary systems and supporting middleware for dynamic music are planned from the start.
Only with the stage for dynamic scoring set early in pre-production can composers then confidently sketch and develop the “sound” of the game and work more flexibly with the schedules of other recording musicians when needed. The earlier developers involve their composers, the stronger their game’s sonic signature will be.
Commit to Great Audio in Pre-Pro
Getting audio teams involved early, even before development, is one of the best ways studios can pursue their biggest and boldest visions and keep their best player experience in mind. Audio plays such an important role in final product impressions — and the most inspired game audio results from a strong interplay between audio, creative, and engineering alike. So, give your audio teams time and space to prioritize creative cohesion by not keeping us benched until production is already underway.
Say it with us now: No pre-pro without audio!
