GAME SOUND PRODUCTION “Finding the right people
to make the facility and provide the kit was easy. Having worked in a previous facility built by The Studio People, they were the obvious choice to come up with an innovative design for the multipurpose game audio space we required. Also, HHB was the natural choice for all our monitoring, hardware, and software, providing invaluable advice on connectivity.” Greg Wheeler, manager,
A new five-room facility has been created, including a large 7.1 mix space
professional audio sales at the company, says: “HHB has been supplying Lionhead with audio equipment for over 10 years. We are excited to be involved with the recent studio refurbishment and to find out about the audio requirements of the latest generation of computer games.” Lionhead’s significant
SOUNDBITE –THE STUDIO PEOPLE
Peter Keeling (managing director): “Building five high-specification studios in a relatively small area surrounded by live offices was always going to be a challenge, especially when you have to include an accurate mixing position for 7.1 surround – a challenge we were willing to accept! With some carefully calculated wall/ceiling constructions, high- spec floating floors, and room acoustic
be World, Creatures, Heroes, etc. This has multiple benefits – not only does it provide the design team with someone always available in ‘scrums’ (short bursts of multi- disciplinary ‘agile’ production based on specific goals) to aid them realise game features, but it empowers the sound designer to own, experiment with, and sculpt their own segment of the game. “We’ve also seen a huge
shift into the implementation strategy, largely enabled by our use of the Unreal 4 game engine and Wwise audio middleware systems/ integration tools. Unreal 4 now gives sound designers the facility to create and tweak complex playback and audio behaviours themselves
www.audiomedia.com
treatments, we achieved exactly what we set out to do – the rooms sound perfect! And for a top client such as Microsoft… they had to look the part too. We worked closely with Steve Brown and the team to ensure the colour schemes and technical furniture designs gave them the creative space they were looking for. We are very proud of the finished result!”
through a very powerful system called ‘blueprints’ (similar to UE3’s kismet). “With blueprints you can
‘plug in’ sound almost anywhere, going way beyond the simple old ‘play event > play wav’ idea. The full Wwise functionality of RTPCs (real- time parameter controls), states and switches are at hand to be used by sound designers who can themselves simply create logic boxes and connect ‘pins’ to the game-play code (where traditionally they’d have required the wizardry of an audio programmer). “This provides freedom for
sound designers to proactively create complex dynamic audio playback systems, which after proving, may (or may not) be turned into a ‘pure code
solution’ depending on what is optimal. I feel strongly that giving the team ownership and technical access to create their audio systems and content will enable higher quality effort and results.”
NEW FACILITY Part of Brown’s overall strategy for audio provision has been the creation of a new five-room facility centred around one large multipurpose room with four other 7.1 sound design suites – as he explains: “Hand in hand with creating a larger audio team is the need for expanded facilities to house them. I’ve noticed a disadvantage to a traditional live room/control room design within games developers – the live room’s
useful acoustic space can often be left empty while some poor sound designer’s working down the hall under less than ideal listening conditions. “So I wanted us to create
not only a facility that offered four small sound design rooms for daily work but also a large flexible multifunctional space that could be used for sound design, Foley recording, voice recording, and large team- scale mixing. “Having a large team 7.1
mix space is incredibly important so each sound ‘area owner’ can sit within a large sweet spot while elsewhere at the rear of the room an operator can profile and mix in real-time using Wwise, tweaking volumes on-the-fly as the game is played by the mix group. “With a large facility came
the need to standardise the equipment and software setup throughout the rooms to enable a flow of data and sessions to be used throughout the team. This is also important because we work very closely with the Microsoft Central Media (based in Redmond, USA) who run a very similar set of software and plug-ins.
investment to provide premium in-house facilities and talent so close to the heart of game development is another reminder of how seriously audio is now being taken in the world of videogames – at least, wherever there is enlightenment as to how powerfully sound, music, and dialogue can contribute to player immersion, game-play mechanics, and story-telling.
www.lionhead.com
Gear list
Audio • ADAM S2X & Sub 8/10 monitors
• Denon SN500 AV amps for source switching Xbox One/PC/Other studios’ video
Connectivity
• RME 800 • Pro Tools 10/11 • Adobe Audition • Soundforge 10 • Soundminer HD+ • iZotope RX 3 • Audioease Altiverb 7 & speakerphone
• Waves plug-ins • Nugen Audio VisLM (for LKFS & LUFS metering)
• Avalon 737 preamp February 2014 27
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