Game audio anyone?

[Jonathan]

Does anyone else besides @Taomine and I dabble in game audio?

[cptfiasco]

Want to collaborate? Ha!

[Jclampitt]

No, but I always thought it would be very interesting. How does one get into game audio?

[Jonathan]

1. Find someone that needs audio work done
2. Convince them you won’t fuck up their project and that you’ll follow through with your deadlines, then offer to do it free of charge
3. Put their work in your portfolio then repeat from step 1 until you have something meaningful to show people.
4. Then showcase your portfolio, repeating steps 1-3, this time for money.

[Jclampitt]

Cool thanks, also what aspect of game audio do you do? The more I think about it game audio could be anything from background music to sound effects to putting mics in front of voice actors, or all of those things.

[Jonathan]

Cool thanks, also what aspect of game audio do you do? The more I think about it game audio could be anything from background music to sound effects to putting mics in front of voice actors, or all of those things.

Its a pretty big field. Way more complex than a music recording in terms of how assets (audio clips) are organized and implemented. Everyone (as in myself too) has to do a little bit of everything at first. Sort of like working in a studio. Tracking, mixing, arranging, producing, editing, performing… you’re stuck doing everything plus cleaning your bathrooms and answering the phone when its just you and you’re just getting going. Sometimes developer groups will want to pair you up with other indie noob volunteers. Or stick you on a team with a bunch of idiots. Its important to back out at that point. The problem is even a small game 3 level demo can be too much for one person to handle. Especially if you’re working for peanuts at first. I won’t lie…its been tough. And there’s a lot of others out there that are willing to work for free. You just kinda have to buck up and decide to clobber your competition I guess.

If I end up needing help with some stuff do you want to me to hollar at you?

[Jclampitt]

Yeah sounds good, let me know! If it’s anything I am capable of doing I’d be glad to help!

[Stan_Halen]

The more I think about it game audio could be anything from background music to sound effects to putting mics in front of voice actors, or all of those things.

I don’t know a great deal about it, but I believe they use multiple short audio files, each one for a specific “clip” in the game action. The game “code” calls each file as needed. Those that are only music for full scenes might be longer and looped? You might be putting mics in front of voice actors, if they record at your place or you perform them yourself, but most likely you’d do it over the internet with experienced voice actors. Most all voice actors now have a home studio and are essentially home recordists like ourselves … only they usually just handle the basics and submit dry/unprocessed audio of the voice recording(s). As Jonathan says, you’d probably be mixing and producing every clip, and there could be tons of them, so it could end up being tons of work if they trust you to handle all aspects of it as a producer. Not to mention organizing and cataloguing all the files.

[Jonathan]

This music scoring process gets a little more complex too. This guy teaches in the music scoring program at Berklee. Can give you a little bit of an idea on how its a different process…

Control-Inputs: How the Game Engine Communicates with Your Score
by Michael Sweet | Dec 23, 2015 | Adaptive Music, Articles, Composition Advice, Tutorials | 0 comments
Control-Inputs: How the Game Engine Communicates with Your Score

Introduction
In this article, we explore the different types of data the game engine can send to the music engine. Video games must keep track of all kinds of data. As composers, we help choose which parameters and data from the video game affect and change our interactive music scores. Some examples of video game data may include:

The locations of the player and enemy within the game
The progress that has been made on a particular puzzle
Whether the player is paused on a menu screen, or actually playing the game
The season or time of day depicted in the game world
The player’s health in the game

This data can be used to control and change the music in different ways. For instance if the health of a player is low, we may use DSP (digital signal processing) to filter the high end by applying a low-pass filter. Or, if the player moves from one location to another the music may switch to a different theme. In this article, we refer to the parameters that control the music as control-inputs. Control-inputs have two basic properties:

What is the unique parameter which is going to change the music?
How is the music going to react based on changes to this parameter?

Control-inputs are not unique to video games. In fact, music has had many different types of control-inputs for altering and changing music in real-time for many centuries. For example, Mozart would use dice games (Musikalisches Würfelspiel) to determine the order of phrases in a piece of music. Earle Brown used the movements of a Calder mobile to determine the notes that were played by an ensemble in . Circus bands would provide accents based on the movements of the performers. Orchestral conductors control the tempo of the orchestra amongst many other things. James Brown decided when it important for his band to ‘take it to the bridge’.
Similarly, the game itself has many control-inputs which control various aspects of the game. Keyboards, mice, game controllers, cameras, and microphones are examples of control-inputs where players are able to send data to the game engine. That data is then interpreted by the game itself to react in some way, e.g. move the player avatar, or open an object that has been clicked on.

A interactive score for a video game can change in reaction to video game controllers or data too. Composers, together with the programmers and game design team work on which data should change the music, how the music should change, and how to implement it into the final product.

Types of Video Game Data
Although there are many different types of video game data, we’ll focus on the three primary types of data that composers have to deal with: state changes, momentary switches, and ranged data. It is up to the game development team and the composer to decide which of this data should be used to change and control the music.

– State Changes
State changes represent the condition of the player, the game world, or something within the game. For instance the player may have many states within a game such as exploring, solving a puzzle or attacking. The game player may also have several states at the same time such as running and attacking. Similarly the game itself may have states such as when the player is at the main menu screen, or actively involved in gameplay. Although each thing in the game may have multiple states, each individual state has a list of values in which the thing can only be in one of those states.

A state is similar to a key-switch for a virtual instrument. A violin always has a single articulation at any given moment whereas the violin can change articulations or states. For instance, the violin state is pizzicato until they play legato. Additional examples of states within games include player location, enemy location, enemy awareness, type of character interaction (exploring, battling, conversing), npc perception of the player (friendly, suspicious, angry), player actions (flying versus running), environmental factors such as weather, current vehicle, and many more.

In the following example of simple state changes in World of Warcraft, the control-input to the music engine is the player’s location. The player moves between these different locations and the music reacts by crossfading to a new location theme.

https://youtu.be/9-JKJMnH8wM

If you’re still interested… click here to see the rest of the article with game examples

Control-Inputs: How the Game Engine Communicates with Your Score - Designing...

[Chordwainer]

@Jonathan, I’m curious, at what scale of game studio do they farm out their sound needs, vs doing it all in-house? I play a lot of games by Bethesda (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4/New Vegas) and EA (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), and it’s my understanding that they do all their own audio. What’s your take?

[Jonathan]

@Jonathan, I’m curious, at what scale of game studio do they farm out their sound needs, vs doing it all in-house? I play a lot of games by Bethesda (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4/New Vegas) and EA (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), and it’s my understanding that they do all their own audio. What’s your take?

If NASA works like it seems to on the movies, then games are similar. The money comes in, priorities and objectives are defined by the executive staff, the intellectual leadership at the jet propulsion lab figures out a design, then they order it (or chunks of it) from Boeing (if thats what the jpl guys actually do). So if you look at the opening screens of a major game, take one like Mortal Kombat, there are like 14 different companies that have all contributed software patents to the project. So I don’t think you can say it was all in-house. Sometimes gaming music composers are pulled from outside of a companies staff roster. And an instance in the gaming world which would be the equivalent of Pixar running out of room on their dub stages and sending a mix to Skywalker isn’t really in-housing stuff imo, even though their both Disney.

Tonight I just tonight I tied up a contract for a pretty cool project! And the non-disclosure agreement doesn’t prevent me from mentioning it here The graphics and modeling on this one I think are very very cool. Here’s the plot:

[quote]
In the distant future human kind has dispersed into the galaxy only to find the pressures of rampant planetary colonization were too much for Earth’s citizens. Now Earth and the core worlds are destroyed by internal conflict, while strongmen, prophets, and villains invoke war to gain power for themselves amongst the stars. Build a fleet and wage war to protect your people, restoring peace to what’s left of humanity.

Features:
RTS battle space, with 3D movement but 2D style control (ie StarCraft) for intense competition.
Multiplayer battles, earn XP for your crew and capture enemy ships.
Single player campaign telling the story of your struggle for survival in "The Endless War"
Build a fleet of ships that persist over time.
Equip ships with weapons that strike at your enemies weakness.
Recruit officers and keep them alive so that their effectiveness grows over multiple battles.
Control capital ships, fighter craft, and space stations.
Board and capture ships during battle.
Lead an invasion force and conquer an enemy planetary colony.
Game designed to reward for strategic and tactical skill over tenure or pay-to-win.
Use your experience to unlock new ships, weapons, troops, ship components. [/quote]

Its scheduled for release in June, and the team is struggling in the audio department, but the graphics and modeling guys are really committed, and I think they’ve done an excellent job. I’m gonna try and help them out. Unless this project tanks in the next few weeks, it appears I’ll be working with an film composer from California. I’ll probably doing a lot of the sound effects, and I have a better mixing rig than the other guy. We may need some help because its an awful lot of work for and audio department of 3 guys

So its real-time strategy based, but what I thought was cool was 3 dimensional movement. You have to keep track of your fighting on different orbital planes, so you don’t have a flat 2-D surface. You’re trying to manage battle activity above and below different space ships, while eye-balling a radar system which takes some getting used to because its 3-d as well. And depending on what other debris is on the battlefield, and what massive solar bodies are nearby, sometimes your cannons don’t even fire in a strait line…so you have to read the terrain lol.

But it’ll be way fun. I’ll have to re-arrange the next few months, but I’m pretty excited about this one.

[Chordwainer]

If NASA works like it seems to on the movies

Well, it most definitely does not! “That I can tell you.”

In any case, I believe you on the subcontract bit-- that much is definitely in common. For the games I mentioned, the only companies mentioned in the credits are the publisher, the studio, and then hardware things like Nvidia or whatever, which is what prompted the question. I haven’t played one that didn’t have just the publisher and game studio listed in the opening credits. But that’s just because I’m a niche gamer, the only games I play are single-player role-playing adventures, so I have not experienced the vast majority of AAA game titles.

Thanks for the rundown, and good luck on this project, it does sound cool!

[Jonathan]

Ah…I misunderstood the question. You were talking about the ‘above the line’ credits at the opening? I think we’re on the same page.

For clarification, who actually designs spacecraft and how does the process work? Does NASA put the design together then commission it from a builder?

When you see pictures of satellites or telescopes being designed in a clean room and wrapped in gold foil etc… are those typically assembled on campus? Or perhaps in other undisclosed locations?

[Chordwainer]

For clarification, who actually designs spacecraft and how does the process work? Does NASA put the design together then commission it from a builder?

When you see pictures of satellites or telescopes being designed in a clean room and wrapped in gold foil etc… are those typically assembled on campus? Or perhaps in other undisclosed locations?

Depends. Just about all the actual fabrication is done by contractors, ranging from the big boys like Boeing or Lockheed-Martin to smaller firms with only a few hundred employees. Federal government contracting regs require that a certain proportion of the work go to smaller businesses. At the moment, there are also similar regs that a small percentage go to minority- and women-owned businesses, but I fully expect those rules to go away in the new administration

For the mainline human rated spacecraft, most build and operations work is done by a Boeing-LockMart joint venture known as United Launch Alliance (ULA), operating at Johnson, Marshall, and Kennedy Space Centers. For robotic spacecraft, JPL builds some of their own (they are not an actual NASA field center, but a contractor outfit-- a federally-funded research and development corporation, FFRDC) for the missions they run, and very often in partnership with LockMart. Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland builds lots of satellites (pretty much all of NASA’s Earth science efforts), as does the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Boeing, LockMart, and several other similar firms also build components and entire spacecraft too for robotic missions.

Finally, there is a burgeoning commercial launch industry following a years-long push by the Obama administration. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, and others are building s/c that can take cargo (and soon, crew) to and from the ISS, and also to launch comm sats and other orbital assets. I am all for this-- it is time to turn low-Earth orbit over to the private sector so that NASA can focus on real deep-space exploration (by definition, anything out of Earth’s gravity well).

As an aside, this is the kind of info I bring up when someone complains that “we have too many problems here on Earth and shouldn’t be wasting money on spaceflight.” As if spaceflight means shoveling wads of cash into rockets and launching them into space… All that money goes to pay highly skilled US workers, sparks innovation, enables the modern life and society everyone takes for granted, and feeds the human thirst for knowledge. In terms of return on investment, it is far and away the best payback our country has ever realized, not even close.

Hope that helps!