I've been quite busy over the past weeks so lets get straight to it!
What I've Been Up To
Just a week ago I re-launched my website. I decided to remove my blog section for the time being because I'm getting more involved writing for designingsound in addition to being a news editor. I still have an archive with some of my old blog posts.
Currently I'm wrapping up two VR experience projects with Wasted Studios for Drehfrabrik (The Lake & Paragliding). Both are made using CryEngine & Wwise. Working with Wwise in CryEngine was a great experience. The Audio Translation Layer (ATL) makes integrating Wwise pretty straight forward & the documentation is very thorough!
My work on Rise Of Legions is also progressing nicely. At the moment I'm mastering the current set of sounds & we're doing the first audio related playtests. We're still working with OpenAL & a very feature limited custom sound manager. But we're planning to switch to FMOD which I'm very excited about because it will open a window to a world of improvements & possibilites!
I also started taking the new Hans Zimmer Masterclass on film scoring. Although my work is more focused on Sound Design, Hans Zimmer is one of my big idols in film music & I was really intersted in what insights he has to share. In a lesson about "working with producers" he makes a very good point in that he prefers to get the story of movie told by the director/producer instead of reading the script. This way he can get a better understanding of his/her vision on a deeper level.
I fully agree. One important part of my job as Sound Designer is to understand the needs of a project & the vision of my clients. I believe it's crucial to talk things through & ask questions face to face in addition to reading Game Design documents. That's why I prefer to do regular Skype calls to discuss project progress. Sound & audio are very subjective & everyone hears things different. Establishing a good understanding of how my clients "listen" & what they imagine the sound to "sound" goes a long way!
GameAudio News
Speaking about FMOD, Firelight has changed their licensing model & their indie tier now allows the use of FMOD free of charge for one game a year with less than $500k budget (that's the reason RofL is making the switch). This is really exciting & it's going to be interesting to see how Audiokinetic & other Middleware companies will react. I expect some exciting news/announcements from GDC next week.
In other news, the latest FMOD release now enables the use of FMOD in HTML5 projects. Live demos can be found here & here. Epic Games also announced that UE4 is getting a new audio system which I look forward to check out (highly recommend watching the video).
Lets Meet!
I'll be attending A:MAZE in early April. If you're there too I'd love to meet & say hello! Let me know if you can make it :)!
What's To Come?
I plan to create a short video or article series on getting started using Reaper (my weapon of choice) for GameAudio covering things like basic setup considerations & workflow improvements. If you have questions regarding this topic I'd love to hear from you!
