Audio Arts – Week 3 – Process and Planning:
Would anyone at Rockstar Games really know what it sounds like to fire a machine gun from a motorcycle during an off road car chase ?
Sticking with the GTA franchise for this week’s exercise, I have compiled an excel document of categorical significance to organising game audio assets. There were a few issues encountered with this, not the least being that excel is a temperamental program at the best of times and running it in the lounge room on an old laptop is just painful.
I think the fundamental question it has raised for me is this; do I want to be a part of this industry? Game audio seems to have now surpassed film in terms of the quantity of sounds that need to be made available for a project. Despite this, industry insiders seem to indicate that it is still largely an afterthought in the eyes of major game developers. So it was with skepticism that I read through Mark Lambert’s glowing report of his ‘rewarding’ experience with sound designing the ‘Elder Scrolls IV’.
There is certainly something to be said for the pride one must feel at the completion of such a monumental task, but does the end result justify the sacrifice. Typical high-pressure scenarios were laid out by Mark, such as staying up till 4am working on this and that, only to sleep for three hours and get up to do it all again. I can’t think of anything worse. I find it interesting that the gaming industry has adopted this blanket approach to burning out all individuals involved, although, as much of the industry has developed in workaholic
Maybe I’m just bitter because Uni seems to take away all my leisure time, while throwing so much work on the schedule that I feel I cant really do a good job of anything…..a-ha! When I leave I’ll be prepared for a soul destroying six month career in the game industry!! Pessimistic? Me?
Click here to link to online folder containing the excel file for this week.
Reference:
Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 3 – Process and Planning.” Lecture presented at Tutorial room 408, Level 4,
posted by David J Dowling @ 2:51 PM
4 Comments:
Wow that's an honest appraisal of the Uni experience and the game industry "experience" too. It does seem odd on the surface, and I've read the same from film sound designers and composers working until the wee hours. Guess the $ rules the roost. I tried downloading your asset sheet for comparison, but the files weren't available on box.net?
Yeah, I don't know why but the excel doc was 34MB and box wouldn't take it so I'll have to dump it to a PDF at UNI on Monday..
When we went to the Krome (Aust game company) presentation, the two game developers (a programmer as well as an artist) both boasted stories of staying up to all hours working on a game. They were pretty happy about it though, so I guess its horses for courses. In terms of the complexity of video games, its only going to get worse in terms of sound assets needed, having said that, the teams working on games nowadays are bigger than ever.
I remember staying up until the wee hours of the following evening, and that was just for last semesters Max patch. Hated it. F**king hated it. Maybe if it was time spent doing something enjoyable it would have been better.
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