At Somatone we love any discussions of game audio and/or sound production, because generally they aren’t talked about enough. So when we saw Jaime Cross’s article about game audio we were pretty excited. (more…)

One of the most daunting stages in the collaborative process relates to how and where to start with the creative and logistical partnership with a game developer or publisher.

Approaching a new game or, even more so, jumping in on a live product, can sometimes be an overwhelming experience. We have participated in more than a few meetings with game developers, producers, game designers, programmers, and creative directors wherein time was spent in discussions, but at the end of the call, we are no closer to understanding what is needed, or what the vision for the game is. This phenomenon birthed an approach for us that works well for all stakeholders in the project. (more…)

1. What have you been working on for Rumble’s KingsRoad game over the past 18+ months?

We’ve been working on all audio aspects of the game, including the full range of sound design and music as well as character voices. In the early stages, we were also doing implementation (both remote and onsite). (more…)

June marks the first anniversary of the public release of Marvel Heroes, so what better time to recount the time I’ve put into the game? It has been nearly 2 years since I first set foot in the Gazillion building, so here it goes… (more…)

The Circle of Development Trends

Casual and mobile game development tends to be cyclical, with a big hit game leading developers to create games with similar themes and gameplay. In the early and mid-2000′s, we worked on a lot of Match-3 style games that followed in the wake of the success of titles like Bejeweled and Zuma. (more…)

Skeleton Hand is a Chicago-based company that is currently in the process of creating their first game titled Incarnate: Body Mind and Soul. With their unique game concept, Skeleton Hand will redefine how both turn-based strategy and living-card games are played. (more…)

An introduction to the on-site audio guy

By Ben Gabaldon, Sound Designer, SomaTone Interactive.

I’m happy to be writing today on the difference between creating sound for games, and creating sound with games. More specifically, the difference between on-site and “over the wall” audio development. That is certainly not to say that “over the wall” is the wrong approach, but the process is very different. It’s impossible to say one is better than the other, because they both offer completely different advantages. But, in this post, I’m going to discuss how awesome and effective it is to be an “audio paratrooper” of sorts.

On a regular basis, I am sent to the front lines of audio content creation and integration at our clients’ offices, in the middle of, or toward the end of production, to connect in person and work alongside the team of people creating a product. It’s never just a product though, it’s their game. It’s what this group of designers, VFX artists, software engineers, animators, modelers, etc., have all come together to shape into something they really care about.

There is always such passion and intensity in the development that comes through with that day- to-day contact. I get to see it in the team meetings, casual lunches, and in anecdotal conversation on a more personal level about all that this assembly of artists is really trying to achieve. Becoming directly part of that team, and that environment of creative conversation, leads to a more immediate ability to contribute to the needs of the team. It can be like playing darts, throwing 3 darts at a time from a distance. Or standing right there next to the board, sticking the darts exactly where you need to.

A day in the life of an on-site audio person varies from team to team. Communication styles vary; team meetings and relationships do too. The shifting sands extend especially to how each team can support their brand new audio contractor guy that just showed up. In some cases, there is a dedicated audio engineer ready to create audio tools into Unreal. In the next, a smaller team of software engineers working furiously to get the next patch stable, just doesn’t have the time to fix a line of code to get your build playable. Adaptability has quickly become my best friend over the past few years of working on site. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are with one or two audio tools, it’s how well you adapt to all new pipelines, engines, and sometimes all new audio tools.

Have you seen Apollo 13, where Houston dumps out that bag of seemingly unrelated components with the expectation to make them filter oxygen? That’s often what I get handed to me, and I love to sort out the solution. But when you are simply creating sound assets for a team under that level of pressure to integrate and manage on their own, you just know that nobody will walk away with a fistful of bulls-eyes.

In contrast, working integrally alongside game development teams delivers enormous benefits to the creative process and overall results in game audio excellence.
Being there, up close and personal, makes all the difference.

Watch for my next entry, when I’ll share more about my on-site adventures.

When it comes to achieving excellence in game audio, here are 10 key components to keep in mind throughout the creative process:

1) Communication – The heart of it all and sometimes the most difficult issue to address, especially when working from afar. Projects and teams can vary greatly, you’ve got to learn to be compatible, resourceful and assertive to make sure you are heard and you’re giving and receiving the information you need. Modern technology has made it easier for us to work remotely but nothing beats good old-fashioned face-to face real-time communicating, which is highly encouraged when kicking off a project.

2) Creativity – On all fronts, this is what drives us. Recording, designing, implementing and problem-solving all can take a nice healthy touch of creativity to help shape the overall tone of a project.

3) Gameplay Driven Approach – Who What When Where Why? Ultimately we are here to support the gameplay, the fun, the action, not to distract from it. There are exceptions of course where audio can take front seat but most of the time we want to work in harmony with the action on screen. Thus we are driven by each project’s gameplay, it affects decisions of all kinds.

4) Implementation – (aka integration) is taking all moving parts of the machine and then putting them together to run just right. This is big and not everyone is aware of it. Without proper implementation, a game’s audio can be ruined.

5) Iteration – Iteration, iteration, iteration. So important in our line of work. You might have created an amazing sound in a linear presentation, but once it’s hooked up in a non-linear universe functioning with all the other moving parts, it could not work at all. Playtesting, revising, testing, revising is the name of the game.

 

6) Collaboration – There is great value in working with others. As sound guys sometimes we like to retreat to our studios, shut the door and make loud noises. Certainly this is encouraged but first and mostly throughout a project, collaboration is where things get done. Establish relationships, hangout around the snacks, sneak in to other team meetings, discuss ideas out loud, if you’re remote make visits to the office once a month, get skype accounts of everyone you’re working with, all these are healthy habits of collaboration.

7) Mixing & Dynamics – It’s all in the mix! This is where the magic happens, the joining together of all your elements. Recording, designing, implementing all require knowledge and awareness. It’s the cornerstone of what we do in audio and a powerful tool for making your aural creations come to life!

8) VO Production – A whole art in and of itself. From the recording, directing, editing and mastering a meticulous approach is needed in each action in order to capture the essence/performance of the human voice and transfer that to a non-linear environment.

9) Experience – Walking the streets of a busy urban downtown area, listening to the way people interact, standing in a field out in the country in the middle of the night under a full moon, watching the latest Marvel film, playing the latest big game. Game Audio is like a painting, all these experiences give inspiration and help shape our sound.

10) Leadership – With experience comes leadership. Taking up the reins, guiding the ship, having confidence in your craft and the ability to communicate that effectively and execute on command.

Recently I had a project where a client had come to us with a great casual game. Unlike others, this game was not a clean blank slate of sound nor was it in development. This game had partial sound coverage that the client was married to and they had asked to replace some of the sounds and add to it, but for the most part keep their old assets.

Now to me this is a rarity, because usually I will find a game that gives me, as a sound designer, more creative control because I get to start from scratch while also watching art and game design develop in the process. And the kicker here was, the sounds they wanted to keep, were actually really great-sounding and very fitting to the game. So talking them out of it was out of the question.

The challenge began.

I started by analyzing what the game was all about just by simply playing it. Again, it was a finished, working game. After experiencing what the game was all about, I had a good idea as to what the developer wanted to do with the sounds and how they wanted to use them for the player experience. By first getting in the head of the developer, I then ventured to the mind of the original sound designer. Questions I asked myself were, “Was he trying to complement the music or was he trying to have good separation?” “Was their design harsh and fast or slow and subtle?”

I figured that they wanted fast but subtle, complementary to the music, very airy, and a certain sound that I like to call, “expensive.” By expensive I don’t mean price, what I mean is sound effects that have high frequency content, are very shimmery on the top end, no muddiness to the sound or attack that is hurtful or annoying to the ear and that are very clear.

Lastly, I looked into what would be the best way to approach finding elements for this design. After going through a couple of libraries of sounds, I soon realized that the “expensive” sounds that I was looking for were only going to be achieved through the use of instruments. I then looked into instruments that I could use with my sound design to make this happen. I found chimes and bells to be the best answer for the job and the rest was smooth sailing from there. I find spending a little bit of time doing the research and brainstorming on a project can go a long way rather than just jumping in and taking a risk. I definitely streamlined my design process and I would encourage anyone to do the same.

Merging existing game sound with new sound is yet another way to be challenged creatively as a sound designer, and taking the time to carefully develop fresh ideas can make all the difference in creating results that everyone loves.

– See more at: https://somatone.com/blog/merging-new-sound-design-to-match-existing-sound-design/?newpostid=2097#sthash.02SLOAzc.dpuf

When SomaTone Interactive opened its doors in 2003, the notion that “casual games” would one day generate billions in annual revenue was inconceivable to most of the traditional video game community, who largely dismissed this sector of their powerhouse industry.

Much to the surprise of many early doubters, however, the casual games marketplace wound up exploding beyond people’s wildest dreams to become the most dominate and stable sector of the video games industry today.

Early in the game, we at SomaTone believed in the potential of casual gaming. So much so that we bet all our chips on this untapped market, wholeheartedly building a team with shared passions for music and sound design, video games, and audio excellence, to service this yet-to-explode corner of the industry.

Humble Beginnings Set the Stage

Like many great start-up tales, SomaTone’s story began in a less-than-glamorous way, in a studio located deep in the SoMa district of San Francisco, surrounded by a rehab clinic, a regular collection of homeless sleeping on the door step, and the ripe smell of human waste ever-present. Kane Minkus, STi co-founder and my former business partner, lived on the couch in the control room, and received regular collection agency calls and even personal visits from “Vinny” looking to collect on thousands in unpaid debts, money that was used to furnish and equip SomaTone’s humble facility.

In 2005, after a period of unsatisfying forays into film, radio, interactive websites, and AAA games, SomaTone fortuitously found itself working on two previously unknown “casual” games, called Diner Dash (Playfirst) and Mystery Case Files (Big Fish Games). These landmark titles had relatively few companions, with Zuma, Luxor, and the initial offering of Bejeweled being among the “hits” of the era. Big Fish’s MCF was the first massively popular Hidden Object Game– a genre that would soon define its legacy as a publisher of games, and Diner Dash (and all of its sequels) is still an iconic casual game nearly 10 years later.

From the early days of PC Downloadable titles until now, the Casual Games industry has experienced relentless growth, even while the industry has continued to reinvent itself. With the discovery that women like to play video games too, this demographic exploded casual games into mass popularity, and other advancements in technology and game platforms arrived fortuitously to add fuel to this genre’s growth. Facebook’s game platform in the early 2010′s, and the success of Zynga–which at the time accounted for nearly 20% of all Facebook revenue–put casual games into high gear. SomaTone was privileged to be on the cutting edge of the Facebook, (social games) revolution, with nearly all of Zynga’s games flowing through our studio, not to mention many others from other publishers following suit. And if the Facebook social game phenomena weren’t enough, the wild popularity of Smart phones, and the relatively recent adaptation of games to this platform, further reinvigorated an industry already on steroids.

SomaTone’s steady growth alongside this marketplace came about through a mix of good old-fashioned passion, hard work, pavement-pounding, boot-strapped blood and sweat, and most of all a fervor that sprang from a true and equal love for audio production and the business of creativity.

More than one thousand games later and ten years after launching into this highly competitive business, SomaTone enjoyed its best year ever in 2013 by working on more than 150 projects, delivering our best music, SFX and audio leadership, and posting our highest annual revenue numbers between our three studios, to the shared credit of our highly talented and dedicated 15-person team.

Equally interesting, while 2013 marked a high point for SomaTone, this was also the year when three of the former pillars of AAA game audio production–Soundelux DMG, Technicolor’s Game-Audio Division, and Dane Tracks– all shuttered their doors and pulled up stakes. We’re humbled by the fact that our once little-known, under-the-radar game audio studio has steadily grown to have now surpassed these former titans of the game audio community. We’re grateful for an incredible odyssey with all of our partners, from the independent developers to the major developers and publishers that we continue to work with.

Changing Faces, Changing Landscape

In the last ten years, the industry landscape has changed so radically that I barely recognize its terrain. This is most strikingly realized during my annual engagements with Casual Connect, the first and most widely attended Casual Games conference, which is, despite its equal growth, now attended by less than 1/10th of the companies who originally dominated those conference halls, and an ever fewer ratio of casual game industry executives, who seem to have migrated away from this industry as it has reinvented itself. It’s ironic, that with each shedding of its skin, there is also shedding of those companies and executives who had made such intrepid growth possible.

SomaTone now faces the start of its second decade in a duality, as both part of the diminished old guard who embraced casual games early in its genesis, as well as survivor, and beyond that, a blossoming leader, in an industry that has reinvented itself more times then Arnold Schwarzenegger (and with much greater success!)

The reinvention of this industry seems to be working on a 3-year cycle, with mobile games now entering its 3rd year of dominance (depending on when you mark your calendar) and already we can see the tablet, the Smartphone’s larger and more powerful cousin, beginning to position itself for a coup.

Through it all, SomaTone has navigated the changing landscape by honoring the same core principles as always, which reflect a deep love for, and commitment to, audio excellence, creative leadership, and the ever-captivating business of creativity.