Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 31 take on how that balance should work, and how do you manage it on your projects? MK: I think it's the way forward for our industry. We've been through a period over the last 10-15 years where we had more specialists: people that just made sounds, people that just implemented sounds and so on. This has happened in disciplines beyond just audio. This contributes to a problem we're seeing with team sizes and budgets that are larger than ever, and when these projects don't succeed, the financial repercussions are catastrophic from a business perspective. This is causing publishers to be far more conservative about which projects they will fund, more aggressive about closing studios. It's a very big problem right now for our industry at large. At the audio level, I think it makes sense for more reasons than just financial. It's difficult to even design and edit a sound without understanding how it gets implemented into the game. Usually, the first thing I do when building sounds for something in-game is work out the implementation: I figure out how the gameplay script/code, animations, VFX, etc., work together to create the result I'm building sounds for. This lets me know where my sync points are, and what in-game variables I have available to me for runtime manipulation of a sound. I'll usually "pre-implement" a sound, where I create the sound events for the thing, but point them at sync beeps. I'll capture a video of gameplay showing the feature, playing the beeps, then import that into my DAW and begin building sounds knowing where I can sync things up in gameplay. I'll also use automation in the DAW and basic effects to simulate how I might use in-game variables to manipulate the sound at runtime. For example, if a beam weapon can overheat over time, I might automate the level of a layer and the wet/dry mix of a distortion effect in the DAW to simulate how I'd do the same in-game, then render out the layers, put them into the game engine, and set it up to behave the same way. This isn't a one-time process. Inevitably, when you get your sounds into the game and playtest them, you find you need to make tweaks in the DAW. So you go back-and-forth from game to DAW and Wwise, making tweaks to the sounds in either place, testing to see how the results sound to get to the goal. The more complicated the playback system is, the more important it is to have the ability to hook things up and understand how they're being used when creating the sounds. To me, the idea of a sound designer who just makes sounds but doesn't do implementation would be the linear equivalent of a sound designer who makes sound effects then throws them into a folder for a video editor to sync up to picture. There's so much creativity in HOW the sounds get hooked up and played back that I can't imagine NOT wanting to do that piece of it. It does require a broader base of knowledge, but I think it's worth it. And given the current state of our industry and how I think things will go in the future, particularly with smaller team sizes, I think those of us who can do both well have much higher odds of staying employed. Memorable Moments Is there a sound moment or system from your career that stands out as particularly meaningful or memorable? MK: I always struggle to remember these moments. My meaningful memories are usually centered around the team I worked with rather than any particular sound or system. I love working with great people, I love learning from them, I love working together to succeed. I'm far less focused on what I'm working on than on who I'm working with. That said, one moment that does jump to mind is a boss fight on a project I worked on a couple of years ago. We had some fun mechanics, like the ability to freeze the boss in place while he was walking through a pond, and the boss could attack with burning blades on the end of chains. Figuring out how to make the chains sound great, with points on a spline that would extend and retract as he threw and swung them, was challenging. Our team had a blast figuring out how to get all the pieces working. Looking Ahead: Trends & Tech What innovations or trends in game audio are you most excited about as we look ahead? MK: I feel like we're well past the point of being limited by voice counts or memory at this point. I'm interested in the runtime effects being of higher quality. I'm interested in anything that speeds up our workflow and allows us to iterate faster. I think what the Unreal audio engineering team are doing with MetaSounds is extremely cool, and I keep poking my head in to check out the latest developments. I can't answer this without mentioning AI/machine learning/LLM tools. I'm very interested in any tools that can help us debug problems, implement faster, and be more efficient in our work. There's a ton of potential there. Machine learning tools are already proving useful in sound design with things like dialogue cleanup, reverb matching and more. I hope to see more tools in the future that help us do great work while still keeping humanity and soul in the creative process. Career Advice for Newcomers What's the best advice you've received in your career, and what advice would you give someone just starting out in game audio? MK: Don't be transactional with people. Focus on genuinely making friends, helping others, and always getting better at the craft. If you're doing those things, the work will come. I've built my career on these three pillars, and while I may not be the best sound designer in the world and I've certainly stumbled on some of them at times, I feel like I'm always getting better and I've always been able to find work.