We may be biased, but developing games is one of the greatest forms of creativity around, largely because it’s so intensely collaborative. There’s something so special about seeing the efforts of so many people with completely different skillsets and personalities come together to create an original and captivating experience.
As with any colossal act of communal creation, results will vary depending on how well its contributors work together and engage in best practices — including those that define great game audio collaborations. As a creative bunch, we audio folk tend to leave the strict and formal aspects of business relationships to the contractual stuff, but developers can get a lot of extra oomph out of their collaborators with a few unspoken “rules of engagement” that the savviest of studios seem to do well.
Here are three principles that developers can practice to gain more advantages in their game audio collaborations, championing clarity and flexibility across sound design, voice, and music.
1. Communicate Early and Often
One of the biggest challenges your audio teams face is timing. In an ideal world, audio would have a place at the table in the earliest stages of pre-production — at the very least an audio director who can capture and maintain the audio vision.
By having audio represented early, studios can better anticipate the technical needs of their music, sound, and voice from the jump instead of having to suboptimally reconfigure or retrofit back-end systems later in development.
The earlier your audio team gets involved in development discussions, the more time they will have to experiment and refine their compositions, sound design, and vocal characterizations to raise the profile of your game’s creative vision.
As development progresses and features are added or modified, audio needs will inevitably shift and evolve, so proactive communication is a constant best practice to keep your audio team on track. If there’s one thing you can count on audio folks for, it’s having good ears.
2. Keep Your “Cables” Uncrossed
Good cable management is more than maintaining a neat studio space. We’re not talking about AUX cords — we’re talking about communication channels and how ideas get shared.
As the scales of teams grow to meet development demands, it’s important to keep a clear system in place for corralling your many contributors and ensuring alignment and agreement, every step of the way. This includes everything from written documentation and direct messages to a clear chain of cascading contacts for swift conveyance of timely decisions.
One way we keep our own cables uncrossed at Unlock Audio is by channeling all our projects through an in-house producer. As the human interface, this role helps studios get ahead of the needs and concerns of our sound designers, implementors, voice directors, and composers, while giving studios a consistent delegate and interpreter — someone who understands both the development and creative sides of the collaboration — to champion the studio’s vision as their game’s audio takes sonic shape.
Throughout the exchange between developers and creatives, it’s critical for feedback to be clear and constructive. We know all too well the frustrations that can arise when requests are misinterpreted or misunderstood. “We’ll know it when we hear it” isn’t enough to chart a path, and “make it sound more blue” could mean something different to everyone. Phrases like “make it sound heavier, bigger, higher, darker, harder” may make perfect sense to whoever is saying them, but there are myriad ways to make something sound “higher” or “darker.” So, use specificity as a strength in setting your audio teams on the right track to deliver super sound design.
3. Leave Nothing Unspoken
If you have even a scant idea of what you want to hear, just say it! Better yet, share a comparable example for your audio pros to reference. We have good ears, but our mind-reading capabilities are limited.
References are a great way to help take a notion and give it more weight for us audio pros to interpret. Maybe it’s a snippet of a song or a clip from a movie. Maybe it demonstrates something you want to avoid instead of drawing upon in your final sound design. A simple link is all it takes to prevent many miscommunications.
We audio folks are creative souls who thrive on bringing your vision to sonic life, so too much information as inspiration is always better than not enough. Even if you think you’ve shared everything you possibly could, chances are we’ll have questions to prise even more info out of you, because what a sound designer needs and what a voice director seeks are entirely different beasts.
Be open and prepared for your audio teams to go deeper (as time allows) — from voice directors sussing out emotions and character motivations for voice actors to build upon to sound designers clarifying the tactile elements of environments and actions. Our curiosity and drive are bound only by the time we’re afforded to make your next launch even better, so consider this all the more reason to (always) bring audio in early!
