8
Next Steps
Jobs and Work
Getting work as a sound designer or a composer for games is not easy. Although the industry is big in economic terms and audio teams are expanding along with the size of game projects, it’s still a specialized niche. Depending on the size of the project, there could be a full-time audio team of up to six or seven but two to three is more common and the “lone audio guy/gal” is still not unheard of. In addition to the core members, there will be a significant amount of ancillary work or outsourcing, and both the demand for this work and the size of the core team will vary considerably depending on the stage of the project.
We think producing sound and music for games is fun and would hope that you make it part of your life after reading this book. But if you intend to try and earn your living in this field, you need to ask yourself some honest questions.
Do You Have What it Takes?
Sound Designers
• Do you love games?
• Do you understand games?
• Do you love sound?
• Do you carry a portable recorder with you all the time?
• Do you instinctively pick up, tap, rub, scrape, and stroke interesting objects you come across just to see what kind of sound they make?
• Do you stop in the middle of the street when someone knocks against a railing and it makes an interesting noise? Do you come back at 5:30 in the morning when it’s quiet and there’s no one around to record it?
• When you accidentally break something, is your first thought, “Damn! That’s going to be expensive to replace!” or “Damn! I wish my recorder was running for that!”?
• Did you enjoy this book?
• Have you built your own level to try out the ideas in this book?
• Have you made some cool audio systems that we haven’t even thought of?
• Have you read every article referred to in the bibliography?
• Have you spent days following the links from the www.thegameaudiotutorial.com website to further your knowledge?
• Have you joined the forums suggested on the site, read through all the past posts, and helped out some newbies?
• Have you downloaded FMOD and Wwise, worked your way through their tutorials, and realized how great they are and what you could do with them if only someone would help you hook them into a real game engine?
• Have you been to GDC? (The Game Developers Conference)
• Have you been to the Develop conference?
• Have you been to an AES conference? (Audio Engineering Society)
• Have you gone to the UDK site and joined a modding team to help them out with the sound for their game?
• Are you an advocate for audio, explaining what you can do to make their game better?
• Are you proactive and self-motivated?
• Do people enjoy working with you?
Composers
• Do you love games?
• Do you understand games?
• Do you love music?
• Do you have a desire to write music that you just can’t shake off?
• Do you use this desire to write as much music as you can for any opportunity you find?
• Do you write music for a college band, a local orchestra, a local dance company, student or no-budget films?
• Did you enjoy this book?
• Have you written music to try out the systems in this book?
• Have you played around with these systems so you understand what’s going on?
• Have you made some better systems for your music that we haven’t even thought of?
• Have you gone to the UDK site and joined a mod team to write music for?
• Are you an advocate for music, explaining what you can do to make their game better?
• Have you read every article referred to in the bibliography?
• Have you spent days following the links from the www.thegameaudiotutorial.com website to further your knowledge?
• Have you joined the forums suggested on the site, read through all the past posts, and helped out some newbies?
• Have you downloaded FMOD and Wwise, worked your way through their tutorials, and realized how great they are and what you could do with them if only someone would help you hook them into a real game engine?
• Can you write music in lots of different genres?
• Can you produce professional-sounding stereo and surround mixes of your music that still sound good when put up against the music in your favorite game?
• Do you understand instruments and how to write for them?
• Can you produce convincing MIDI mockups of that orchestral score you’ve been working on?
• Have you been to the Develop conference?
• Have you been to GDC? (The Game Developers Conference)
• Have you been to an AES conference? (Audio Engineering Society)
• Are you a member of GANG? (The Game Audio Network Guild)
• Are you proactive and self-motivated?
• Do people enjoy working with you?
These are not exhaustive descriptions of the skills you need but are intended to prompt you to think about whether you have the motivation and commitment to succeed. If you want a better idea of the kind of skills that the different roles require, there are two good places to start looking.
Jobs and Skills
The first place you can get an idea of the skills that employers are after is in the advertisements for jobs themselves. On the website (www.thegameaudiotutorial.com) there are links to the major game recruitment sites and also a link to a document with more than 60 job ads we’ve collected from the past few years. These descriptions give you a pretty good idea of what people are after.
Here’s the list of advertised job titles we’ve come across:
Audio director/Audio manager/Audio lead/Audio production director
Sound designer/Game sound designer/Audio designer/Audio artist/Sound supervisor
Audio implementer/Audio integrator/Technical sound designer
Audio engineer
Audio person
Audio programmer/Audio software engineer
Music director
Composer/Music transcriber/Note tracker
Voice director
(You’ll note that composition work is rarely, if ever, advertised. This is simply because there is no need. Companies will frequently go on word of mouth or with a composer whose work they’ve heard previously. If these companies want someone new, then there’s always the 20 or 30 CDs that arrive daily through their mailbox from budding composers like you.)
In addition, there are many other related roles for people with audio or music skills such as recording engineer, field recordist, music copyist, orchestrator, music editor, dialogue editor, voice-over director, and related casting and localization personnel. As an aside, the one area where the industry is in desperate need for people is audio programming. Knowing about audio, and about programming, is a rare commodity, so if the bit of scripting we’ve dabbled with has whetted your appetite at all, we’d recommend looking into taking this interest further. Be warned that programming is a unique skill set and a long haul, but it is one of the few areas in the game industry where there’s a good chance of a job at the end.
Going back to the job descriptions, you need to read them carefully as there’s little consistency in what these titles mean, or what the jobs entail, across the industry. For instance, one person will say that an audio engineer is someone who is chiefly responsible for running the studios and the recording sessions that take place, whereas another will consider this person as an audio programmer or audio software engineer. Getting these requirements wrong can lead to a rather uncomfortable job interview.
In addition to looking at job descriptions, there’s another unique resource that should be of great benefit to you when trying to understand what the different roles entail. Read on.
IASIG Game Audio Education Working Group
Author Richard Stevens writes, “I should disclose an interest at this point, as I’m currently chair of this group. Having said that, what follows is, of course, totally unbiased fact.”
We hope that by the time you read this book, the snappily titled Interactive Audio Special Interest Group: Game Audio Education Working Group (IASIG–EDUWG) will have published its Game Audio Curriculum Guideline document (a draft version is already available from www.iasig.org/wg/eduwg). This document is the result of several years of work by members of the group in consultation with game audio professionals from around the globe. Although the primary aim of the document is to advise universities and colleges on appropriate topics for courses on sound and music for games, it is also a very useful reference document for people who want to get into the industry.
The initial part of the document describes the variety of sound- and music-related jobs and roles within the industry; this is followed by a list of skills relevant to those roles. This document should be essential reading to anyone wanting to enter the field.
(Richard Stevens writes, “You see. I told you I would be unbiased.”)
How to Get Work
Like most industries, some jobs are advertised but actually a significant amount of work is found through personal contacts. Here are some ideas for getting to know people and getting yourself known:
Go to conferences. The Game Developers Conference, Audio Engineering Society Conferences, and the Develop Conference, to name a few, are not only great places to learn but also great opportunities to meet like-minded people. You’ll be mixing with game audio professionals and the right attitude, together with a business card with your web address, can sometimes go a long way.
Be an active participant in the game audio community. The community of people involved in all aspects of game audio is unique. As long as you’re not wasting people’s time with totally newbie questions (which, of course, you won’t after reading this book), then you won’t find a more supportive and enthusiastic bunch. There are links to the relevant forums on the website and an active community on Twitter. Sign up and join in.
Contribute by writing articles and talking about your work. If the articles are well written, interesting, and informative, then you will have contributed to other people’s learning and gotten yourself noticed at the same time.
Make sure you have a good friend or influential relative working for a games company. This always helps.
Making a Demo Reel/Website/Blog
The traditional approach of putting a demo reel together on a CD or DVD and sending them off or handing them out has been pretty much superseded by the web. Your website is your showcase of who you are and what skills you have. Make sure you present yourself in a positive way. The best way to learn what works and what doesn’t is to look at other people’s sites - to see what works and what doesn’t. Having a blog in addition to a site is a good way of getting attention and sharing your work. It’s also useful for developing materials in a more informal environment that you can put on your “official” site later.
Here are some tips:
• Avoid sites using Adobe Flash that either (1) have a front page you need to click through to get to the main site, (2) take more than three seconds to load up, or (3) use Adobe Flash. This is number one because if you don’t get this right, most people won’t even bother to go to your site in the first place.
• Make your best work the most visible, and if it isn’t your best work, don’t put it on. Too often good work is diluted by having less strong work around it, so you have to resist the temptation to put up everything you’ve ever done.
• Show that you have a passion for what you do. This doesn’t mean saying, “I’ve always loved music since I was a young child” or “I have a real passion for …..” It means that you show that you’re informed by the latest articles, that you’re aware of the latest game with great audio, and that you’re full of ideas about how to continue to develop great game audio. One way to show your knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject is to write about your process, how you went about things, techniques you used, and why you made the choices you made. This not only demonstrates that you know your stuff but also makes a contribution. (See ‘How to get work’ above.)
Sound design demos should typically contain some or all of the following:
• Linear videos with re-created soundtracks. This will tell people immediately whether you have a good ear or not.
• Specific sound design examples
• Atmospheres
• Weapons
• Creatures
• Spells
• Sound implementation examples. Demonstrate your implementation skills by showing off a game level.
• UDK
• Crytek Sandbox engine
• Valve Source engine
• Unity game engine
• Audio middleware. Show that you can apply game audio principles for any platform by learning one or both of these audio middleware packages.
• FMOD
• Wwise
• Location and studio recording techniques
• Demonstrate your studio and location techniques with a number of clean recordings. Perhaps do a video diary of your recording session. Then combine this with a demo showing how you’ve layered these up to create an effective sound designed scene or level.
• Speech
• Show that you can record speech well, get good performances out of actors, and effectively process the files to suit the needs of the game.
Music demos should contain both linear and interactive music demos:
• Styles
• Show that you are adaptable by composing in a number of styles. Having said that, remember the caveat about not including weaker work. If you can’t write up to your usual standards in certain genres then don’t put it in. Many people make a career despite being specialized.
• Formats
• 5.1 Music mixes are becoming very common, particularly for cut-scenes. Demonstrate your ability to produce a good music mix in both stereo and 5.1.
• Interactive demo
• Produce a video walk-through of a level including your interactive music. Show and discuss (using subtitles) how the music interacts with the game actions and game variables. Record a few versions of the scene that is played in different ways to demonstrate how your music would react.
• Be critical
• Judge your music side by side with your favorite game or movie scores. If it sounds weak in comparison then (1) don’t include it and (2) write some more music.
How to Keep Working
Be extremely good at what you do.
Be nice to work with.
Every game industry person we’ve ever spoken to (and that’s quite a few) has always said these two things about the type of people they’re looking for:
1. Yes, we want people to have the technical skills, but to be honest we mostly use our in-house tools anyway, so being flexible and able to learn new things fast is more important than specific skills on a particular piece of software (they change all the time anyway).
2. What they’re like is more important than what they know. They need to get on with people, be able to communicate, and put across their ideas in a way that’s a discussion—not an argument.
People skills are important in any job, but when you’re around people who have been working 16-hour days and eating pizza at their desk for the last month—even more so. Learning to speak and understand the language of other people’s disciplines will not only improve communication but will allow you to understand problems from other points of view and bring you closer to finding joint solutions. Be part of the team; go to as many meetings as you can. Partly because of the nature of our work environment in closed-off studios (and closed back headphones) and partly because of the perennial underdog status of audio, it can be easy to develop a siege mentality. This isn’t going to help.
Don’t assume that everyone’s an idiot; they just don’t have the same knowledge about what great sound and music can do. Don’t get tetchy. Rehearse your arguments well and put them across in a reasonable and reasoned manner. Don’t forget sometimes to win the war you’ve got to be prepared to lose the battle (see what we mean about a siege mentality?).
In conclusion; be really good at what you do, but don’t forget to be nice too.