AUDIO IS NEVER AN AFTERTHOUGHT


GREAT GAME Professional pre-production Advice from Unlock Audio W


hen you think of games with impeccable, award- winning sound design, you know deep in your core that the developer had total alignment on its


audio goals even before the first line of code took form. Great game audio comes together much more easily when studios involve representatives of each audio discipline (music, sound design, implementation, and voice) in the earliest stages of pre-production and remain committed to constant audio collaboration throughout the twists and turns of development. All too often, audio is treated as secondary to art, story,


and mechanics, but by delaying these essential contributions developers miss out on huge opportunities for creative teams to inspire each other and for engineers to prepare the smartest frameworks for how your audio interfaces ideally with the final gameplay. Here are some words of advice from members across the Unlock Audio team on why involving audio in pre-production is key to packing a more powerful gameplay punch.


CAPTURE A COHERENT AND COHESIVE AUDIO VISION – JASON KANTER, AUDIO DIRECTOR Pre-production is an essential stage for involving an audio director who will craft an overall vision


44 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2025


for the many audio disciplines based on your game’s features, pillars, and themes. We capture this foresight in an audio vision document that covers voice, sound design, and music and serves as a stylistic and technical guide for developers both in and outside of the audio team. Without a clear and concise vision of how a game’s


soundtrack, dialogue, and sound design all work together, the many disparate pieces may be left to the subjective tastes of the many independent contributors. Regardless of how talented any contributor may be, without somebody to establish a common goal for everyone to strive towards, the audio will lack consistency and cohesion, making it feel somewhat disjointed from the rest of the game and possibly from itself. Bringing on an audio director later in production means


that many decisions will have already been made that directly impact audio. These decisions could mean restricting options that sound design has on how to approach a feature or eliminating a pipeline that could have made a feature more efficient. This late timing also severely limits the opportunities for sound to affect and inform other disciplines working on the game. By bringing an audio director (and sound team) on later, developers miss out on the chance to spark those magical moments of an artist being inspired by an original composition or an animator iterating on a run cycle based on the clomping sound of custom footsteps.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56