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SAE Magazine 12-2

increases your level of engagement in the story line, the interactivity, the visuals, how the game works, the fun, the pacing, etc. What’s the importance of audio? It’s not important at all… audio and games…not that important, nah I’m joking. Of course for me audio in games is very important because if you turn it off you don’t understand all the stuff that is happening outside the picture frame so you don’t know where you’re at, for example, if you’re driv- ing a car in the game and you get hit, without sound you don’t get that feeling of being in your body, you don’t get the sense of engagement of putting your- self into an imagined space, it would be like just walking around and being deaf, which can work but you wouldn’t get the experience that you could have with having really good audio. Unfortunately, audio is an after thought, a lot of people think that they could just add audio at the end of the whole thing and it will be okay, but then the game doesn’t have the depth. Could the creation of a game become boring? No! I don’t use the same process with every video game because it would be the same as if you’re doing the same audio design for film vs. a televi- sion show vs. a commercial, those things are com- pletely different experiences. Working with a large team on a big game, like I’ve worked on Need for Speed or NHL, a lot more content is put into it, a lot more speech, like 50,000 lines of dialogue; on independent games there could be no dialogue, maybe there’s just music playing and the sounds that fit the game. So it’s the sense of scale what’s different in every game. Also, it’s very different to work on a puzzle game, like Vessel that I’m work- ing on, vs. Retro City Rampage which is more ar- cade style, so I used a totally different tool set. On Retro City Rampage all the sounds are synthesised and on Vessel I recorded all the sounds using a personal recorder. How can you become an audio designer for games? The easiest way is to go to my website because it’s free…ha ha… http://www.videogameaudio.com, I archive all the presentations I give. But then, once you really want to get into it then you’ll have to start making it, even if it’s a game that doesn’t get released or it’s a demo, you need to get your hands dirty. Do research online and if you’re really inter- ested you should start looking for schools to go to, either a university, private school or taking classes online. I’m launching a game audio school “School of Game Audio” (http://School.VideoGameAu- dio.com) The award winning “Retro City Rampage” will be out this summer. n Visit: http://www.retrocityrampage.com http://www.videogameaudio.com Infobox 69 People & Business // Videogame Creators Index

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