Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
24 M PS E . O R G as possible. This borrows from a term I've heard visual artists in games use. The idea is that you create a gameplay scenario, often in a test area, where under a certain set of circumstances, the game sounds as close to what the final mix will sound like to the players. For example, we'll set up a scenario where in a small little area, the ambience is created and implemented, and if you're fighting one particular enemy, using one weapon, one ability, one of each of the things the player can do in the game, it all sounds great. Get the sounds made, hooked up, mix it, then save a video capture of it and make a backup of a build that contains it if you can. This gives you a reference to come back to down the road. And if in production you decide to deviate from this initial pass, do it again and save it. This process forces you to figure out the basic mix hierarchy, dynamic mix, attenuations, asset loudness standards, all of it. You can then use all those decisions as you move forward, and everything you implement in the future follows that standard. Mentorship & Junior Talent You've led large teams—how do you support and grow junior talent while maintaining high quality across deliverables? MK: It has to be a team effort. I've seen good results in two ways: either pairing the junior talent off with a more senior sound designer who can spend a portion of their time mentoring, or just having the entire team focus on mentoring. Doing team activities like knowledge sharing, tutorial presentations, "How did you do that?" sessions, etc., all help with this. The most important point is that it has to be a conscious effort. You can't just bring someone onto the team and expect them to learn by osmosis. The team has to make an effort to mentor, without keeping secrets as some sound designers like to do, and the junior has to want to grow and be willing to put in the effort to do so. And, in the world of remote work, making a concerted effort to mentor is even more important than it was before. Pipeline, Workflow & Collaboration "I'm a big fan of anything that allows me to work faster and think less about my tools, more about creativity." Designing Flexible Audio Pipelines How do you design an audio pipeline that's flexible enough to support multiple platforms, evolving gameplay mechanics, and shifting timelines? MK: I wish I could give a one-size- fits-all answer to this question, but I don't feel like there is one. It's based on experience, both from working on specific types of games and from playing and analyzing existing games. The easy surface-level answer is to say use something like Wwise, FMOD, or the stock Unreal audio system. And any of those are good enough to get sounds into a game engine, play them back and mix. But the real challenge is in building up the connective tissue between gameplay mechanics and sound playback, and that's IMO where the experience factor comes in. For example, I've worked on a lot of first-person shooters in my career, so I know that there are unique considerations around how automatic weapon playback works. How do you ensure that you get only the correct number of shots, that playback stops when the player releases the trigger, that rate of fire stays consistent despite fluctuations in game framerate? I've Mark during a show-and-tell zoom call with the audio team.