SAE Magazine 12-2

hoursyouspendadjustingiswhatmakesyourgame great. No game can be amazing just from paper to programming. A message for the developing community Always remember that there’s always stuff to learn and focus on being passionate and putting care and love into your game because if you care about your game and you want it to be as good as possible it will show through and the player will feel that. If you go into the game industry and you’re not pas- sionate about the game and just think of it like a job your end result is gonna look like it came off an assembly line and it’s not gonna be reviewed well. So just always take care with your game and if you enjoy your game then others will enjoy it as well. N ow is the turn for Leonard J. Paul, a Com- puter Science graduate with an Extended Minor in Music and Electroacoustics. For the last 15 years he’s been focused on composing, sound design, and has worked in multiple titles for Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Electronic Arts, Backbone Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, Moderngroove Entertain- ment, Rockstar Vancouver and Black Box Games. Nowadays, he is an independent contractor and re- ally interested on working more on independent games. How did you become an audio engineer for games? When I started in games I actually did program- ming, so I went to the university for programming but I also did a minor in music as well, so what I found is that doing programming was fun but I also enjoyed my music classes a lot. What I did is trying to figure out a way of combining the two, so I first started out doing regular graphics program- ming, which I like doing, but then I began to work at a different company and they put me in audio because of my skills. It was an interesting thing to try figuring out how to make the improvements in the audio for a game and make it so that it would really have a good impact on the person that is play- ing the game. Then I decided to continue with that. It’s an area that I find constantly interesting to me. Which are the crucial areas in audio for games? Well, what I really like to do is to fit it in to the de- sign of the game, so I’m really having a fun time working with the game and working with the visu- al design, the interaction design and the audio de- sign, so to bring those elements together it’s really exciting. If you just create your whole game and then you put music or a sound at the end of it, it comes through like that, it seems like it’s an ad on, it doesn’t seem like it’s integrated into the rest of the experience. If you have an audio designer or a composer starting early on in the project they can add a lot of things that another game designers wouldn’t think of, it’s just another layer that really requires having an expert or somebody that’s really sensitive to sound and working on it. I think that’s like the kind of thing that I really like lending to a project: coming in early, seeing what kind of expe- rience you want the gamer to have and making it so that the audio supports that vision and ➤ 68 People & Business // Videogame Creators Index

SAE Magazine 12-2

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