7
I wouldn't worry about it for now. But in my experience there's a few likely situations:
Especially when starting out as a freelancer, you may get to do a lot of smaller iphone/browser games, from small dev studios. It's unlikely they will work with middleware, and for better or worse, you'll be the guy they ask to throw some sounds over the wall at the ...
7
There's really no such thing as MIDI Synthesis.
Synthesis is the process by which sounds are 'synthesised' using various modulation and generation techniques.
MIDI is the "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" and is a protocol by which electronic music instruments can pass control and note information.
MIDI is only interested in sending and receiving ...
6
There is a degree of variance from studio to studio, but generally speaking, the work load is related to the game dev cycle.
In my experience there are 3 phases of game dev. Pre-production, production and last few months before ship.
Pre-pro is about exploring ideas, trial and error with music and story, and developing systems/tools that make ...
6
the few things that I run into when doing forcefields:
1) electrical forcefields are going to sound different than magical forcefields. Be sure to know what's causing the FF story-wise as you pull together your source elements.
2) forcefields tend to be tricky to mix unless you plan the frequency spectrums out carefully. Its very easy to get caught up ...
6
It's a growing field of research and there's clearly much interest into procedural audio, because of its interactive/dynamic and synthesized nature. P.A. is mainly proposed to be a great solution for anything that's repetitive and for creating common "boilerplate" sounds such as footsteps and ambient noises that consume time, which the busy audio designer ...
5
one way is to slap a side-chained gate on your source sound, and feed the gate with an irregular (referring to tempo here) sound to control when it opens. if you know what kind of rhythm/a-tempo you want the glitch to have, you can even record yourself tapping with a pair of pens/pencils/drumsticks on a desk or table. this can be the best way to get a useful ...
5
Hi, AudioGaming developer here (which by the way is French, so please forgive my poor english skills) !
PA has been an ignored tool for a very long time, and because of that we sometimes have to struggle a bit against long-established habits, creation pipelines and existing content. But it really just is one more tool, not really designed to replace ...
4
It's an excellent question. For cutscenes, there's definitely a trend to use more perspective, I like to record both using perspective mics and a boom or lav mic to always have a close option.
For in-game cinematics which are pre-rendered you're relying on the capabilities of the audio engine to use real-time DSP effects to create the sense of depth, such ...
4
All the above is true when it comes to 'traditional' games developers that create titles which are released 'as is', in a finalised state (for instance on a disc, in a shop). As those kind of products have a hard deadline, the dev process tends to bottleneck towards a crunch period in the final few months which usually involves lots of long and crazy hours.
...
4
Another issue in why a lot of games choose the close mic perspective is Localization. Localization is generally outsourced to different recording studios depending on language, and using multiple mic set up in the english version complicates and could serious compromise the quality of the localized versions. In this respect it is much safer to record the ...
4
we recorded the dialogue for brothers in arms 2 and 3, as well as borderlands, duke nukem and dragonball z budokai 3.
In each of those cases we ran a 2 mic setup, but that was to handle main challenge of keeping the yelling and talking/whispering phrases in line with one another and working well.
Its my experience that perspective recording would ...
4
try this thread:
Game Audio Culture
4
Games testing is a really good way of learning about games development processes and realities. Even better if you can land a job as audio tester, you will get to work with the in-house audio tools and be in direct contact with the sound team. I started as a games tester myself and it's been invaluable experience. It's not a guaranteed path to becoming an ...
3
Audiokinetic has a game called Cube that you can download (same page as the rest of the Wwise downloads) and drop your sounds into.
3
My understanding is that when an event is called all of the associated sound defs will also be loaded. The data then sticks around until you call freeEventData.
support@fmod.org will typically reply to this kind of technical question pretty promptly.
3
I got my in through a combination of being a tester and knowing the right people. While I don't think it's necessarily the best way in any more you do gain a lot of knowledge of how development works that you won't learn anywhere else. Overall I always like working with people who have been testers since they know all sides of things. It will also make you ...
3
My thinking is:
IF you have the means to support yourself for a while, focus solely on audio projects (indie games, post, personal sound design projects) and hold out for the full-on audio gigs. Testing is not a super direct route in. Audio testing maybe.
However, if you need to pay bills in the meantime, you could probably do worse than a testing job in ...
3
If you are interested in procedural audio, take some time to peruse Andy Farnell's website:
http://obiwannabe.co.uk
One of the best resources on the net. His book "Designing Sound" is also fantastic.
3
You can get FMOD or Wwise for free and use their free tutorial's on YouTube, here's the ones I've watched for FMOD which are great. Another great resource would be to get The Game Audio Tutorial Book which covers UDK which is also a free software. Another good book would be The Complete Guide To Game Audio by Aaron Marks, I would recommend getting it once ...
3
@Melissa,
What kind of game is it? The player perspective will definitely influence how you approach the skeleton audio. I assume as it is for mobile it will either be isometric, top-down or side scrolling?
Secondly, is it real-time or turn based (like the might and magic games, for example?) or something else entirely? This needs to be considered, as a ...
3
Re-watch A Bug's Life for tons of ideas. If you can get the DVD, there's a whole track where it's SFX only: No dialogue, no music. Full of neat ideas there. Seem to remember that Ben Burtt used handcuff ratchets for the feet of the roach in Wall-E. Just some ideas of existing SFX to get you unblocked.
Close-up, dainty, tight foley or SFX seem like they'd ...
3
Take an Unbreakable plastic comb (for your hair), bend the tines back with your thumb, and let them pop up one by one.
3
What I'm wondering is: how many variations of each should I have?
3-8 variations (or as a rule of thumb, 5 variations) depending on the speed of movement (at faster speeds you tend to pick up repetition more easily). The pitch variation (and volume) that you can enable in game engines or audio middleware tools often does the rest.
do I need to have ...
3
The "morph" you're describing is known as (both) spectral cross-modulation, and spectral convolution.
From what i've read in your question, I gather you're interested in essentially crossfading the two sounds together, but in the frequency domain not the time domain?
If that's indeed the case then there are a few ways to go about doing this. you can either ...
3
If the wire is to actually break, I'd go for a guitar string; a thin one, maybe an 8.
Tie it off to something either resonant or not, depending on whether your scenario is indoors or out, then just pull it with one finger til it breaks - wear a glove or it'll hurt your finger ;)
If it isn't to break, just twang, then you save the cost of more guitar ...
2
All of the experienced game sound people i know (and I know quite a few) have at least some field and studio recording experience. If you wind up in game sound for any period of time, you will wind up spending at least some of your time doing the following:
sound fx cutting
sound fx implementation (most of your time is spent here)
scouring your sound fx ...
2
I had the same questions Dakota a few years back. I understood some things the hard way. So if i did them now I would go for:
playing a lot of games in many different sound systems and try to understand "why and how they did it", mostly in the "directors way of thinking".
learn some basic programming (C, Java, and Max/MSP). Cause you WILL need programming ...
2
You may all know this already, but just bare with me and I'll get round to trying to answer the question...
FMOD and Wwise are Middleware Solutions - Unity and UDK are game engines. The reason why this is an important distinction is that both Unity and UDK (correct me if I am wrong) are running the FMOD API as the basis of their audio solution. Both UDK and ...
2
If you're lucky enough to be an in-house sound guy -- which is rare; I only know of two or three here in SLC, and they work for Disney and EA -- you'll get standard 40-60 hour work weeks, until it's time for shipping, and then you're pretty much excepted to help in the crunch, which are absolute nightmares (and huge problem with the video game industry as a ...
2
If you have Crysis you can download the SDK for free, it comes with a certain version of fmod that works with the CryEngine2 editor and you can implement your sound on either the maps that come with the game or something you create. I don't really know much about this tbh so hopefully some one else can help out a little more.
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