From Corporate to Indie and Back Again

[Music] every year I come to GDC I play a little game called whose corporate whose ending wait a minute what happened there who's holding down a full-time job with benefits wearing a logo shirt and staying at the W on the company dime versus who's an independent contractor schmooze them for that next gig staying at the masa if they're lucky but more importantly what were they last year more than with other game development and technology disciplines seems like audio folks tend to spend their careers going back and forth between holding down corporate gigs and freelancing from backroom project studios there are certainly some who have always had jobs and others who have never produced audio except under contract but if you work long enough that in this industry odds are you will eventually transition from one state to the other I've certainly been true in my case more in 1997 I went

to my first GDC in San Jose as an indie green and desperate five years later I showed up at GDC 2002 proudly wearing a danger logo shirt where I began my career as a mobile audio guy later I got assimilated by Microsoft right before GDC 2008 but was back to being indie 4gc 2010 I moved back to the Bay Area from Redmond in time for GDC 2013 and interviewed for an audio engineering job at Kixeye during the conference in 2015 I attended the show as an indie again wearing a flash leather jacket and with a pocket full of twittering machine business cards in full schmoozing for work mode and the first guy I ran into when I got off the park was George the fat man Sanger I said hey George how you doing he looks at me and goes Drescher I got a job for you and that was that a few months later I'm living in lovely Fort Lauderdale Florida and attended GDC 2016 and 17 as

senior audio engineer at magic leap the world's most enigmatic unicorn and now here I am again right back where I started from living in California working as an independent contractor for my backroom studio and title lovin it so to discuss the pros and cons of working freelance versus holding down a job I am lucky to be joined on stage by four distinguished colleagues who have also worked both sides of the equation in alphabetical order Damien Kass Bauer currently an ArenaNet formerly at PopCap plus many independent projects including the oscar-winning Kearney arranges Wilbert Roche award-winning composer for a Call of Duty World War 2 Lara Croft and numerous LucasArts titles Karen Widener president and founder of hate Ball sound in Los Angeles for Millia game tracks and sound deluxe guy Whitmore currently independent formerly at PopCap and Microsoft Game Studios and of course you

can call your humble moderator of the PDX so we will now discuss five topics for 8 minutes each and then do Q&A so the first topic there's the topics art how does being corporate or indie help or hinder the creative process when producing a game soundtrack now for me this kind of one of the things I always do is I always maintain my own home studio because I find being creative in outside of the corporate environment where there's meetings and people running around blah blah blah and it can't really be as free as you might like so if I'm doing a piece of music I was try and write in my home studio and then bring it in to the the corporate studio to implement and test and this becomes important in some cases one of the stories I like to tell is the time I was doing a music title

for a kids game where the monkey was the main character and so I was in my house half naked jump around the furniture making the melody and my girlfriend walks in oh really honey I'm working so how do you guys feel about being corporate or creative in the corporate or in the environment this one's interesting I I'm not very shy about most things so that my first job at Sierra there was an office door that might have been paper and I wrote a lot of music in that room and the people just got used to it so inhibitions the only inhibition I really have is about like if I'm doing you know singing something and that I like my privacy for but I can be I can be creative in a public place pretty much so but if I'm not bugging people that's

a bonus yeah I mean like I guess the obvious answer is that you know when you're in house you're being asked to be creative from the hours of 9:00 to 5:00 yes can you really guarantee that that's when you'll have your melody can you really guarantee that you know most of my ideas come really really late at night and basically nocturnal and my creative process involves coming up with some blue sky idea at night jotting it down in whatever way possible sleeping on it and then in the morning worrying about things like is it good you know how do I like finesse it you know all the details and all that kind of thing that was very difficult to do you know where not only are you in here from you know set core hours or whatever but also you're constantly going to be interrupted by meetings and yeah you know maybe your friends come by for like whatever reason I guess because we have offices and they like to just shut themselves out from the rest of team or whatever and you're constantly being basically assaulted by just all these other details that have nothing to do with you know your creative where your creative work whereas if you are a

freelancer you can kind of set a creative space it's a little easier to pull that off so for me that's sort of sort of how it's gone and why I'll just get this out of the way I do prefer the freelance world and I guess we'll kind of keep coming back to that and yeah I was gonna speak to that too one of the things for me is a lot of times I get hired for sort of special specialized things that I mainly work as a sound designer and I find like being out of how being in demote well I guess half my career is about been Indian half in corporate right at this pointer in house I find I can focus more on specific things because of kind of what Wilbert was saying where you're less interrupted with meetings and you're not oftentimes I'm not implementing either which is good and bad but it kind of takes that focus just to the creation side like for instance I worked on law breakers doing Foley and sound design for that game for about eight months and to just focus on the Foley and sound design for the cutscenes and not have to

worry about other stuff kind of I think that helped the creative process a lot I'm just gonna underline focus again it's like the biggest deal right as a freelancer yeah sure maybe I can drop dive into a technical system and really you know craft this elaborate Faberge egg inside of some middleware integration with the game but that comes at the detriment of when you're in-house creating that same system you may not have the same focus but you have greater resources to maybe push the creativity of it in a different direction instead of the insular system that you create abstracted from the team outside the fence you have the resources of the team in real time that you can push forward the creativity deeper in that direction well that's actually a good point from the the advantage of working in a corporate environment is you have the

ability to from a creative point of view bounce ideas off of people typically people you know and trust and who are involved in the game or the product in in in a similar manner of you are that can be imagined whereas if you're just by yourself in your studio all day which tends to happen on a regular basis sometimes you don't know if what you're doing is good I don't really have anything to bounce it off of until you then send it out and then maybe you hear something back maybe you don't yeah and then that's true that like for instance making stuff in both cases for me I have to consciously make these barriers that you were talking I was like okay even when freelance I still need to put like okay from these hours of this hours I'm not gonna look at Facebook I'm not gonna do this you have to there's more discipline involved and it can be at midnight or whatever but there's still the discipline of yes I'm going to start at 10:00 and go but I also have to do that word it's harder but I used to have this little door sign I put on my thing says do not disturb

you know so I would have these hours at work and yet to have that that's the only way I could do anything at work did they respect they do not but no they didn't but Becky made sure they did thank you would be like you know awesome colleague so it ended up being respected okay yeah so it worked well they respected Becky yes you know and I remember your office in at Microsoft though head was like a glass booth oh that was horrible I didn't get any but that was a different job I wasn't doing creation in that office every day right yeah I had a glass booth where I did do creation at danger and the first thing I did was I put up aura like so people couldn't see what's happening right and this actually became a little bit of an issue in the office because people want you know what's it doing in there what's going on there Vickie became both more of a mystique but also a little bit standoffish oh he's he's got his thing you know he's he's that guy or as I call it the pet

itself a lock on the inside right you know what else oh well what they do is it I almost always get my best ideas when I'm walking my dog right it's like I'm out there and I'm not thinking about the work and then I'll look at the trees and I'll bring work up a sweat and then some idea will come to me and my whole that's a good idea Oklahoma no yeah on the subject of inspiration one angle that I'm not sure has been touched on but sometimes you can get inspiration from sources outside of audio and if you can make friends with people in the art scene some of the best quote unquote best ideas that I've had haven't come from audio people at all but from designers and artists and concept folks and you know making friends with them which I know it's not the easiest thing in the world to do because usually it's like audio Eiland out their words we're sequestered into our little corners but if you can make those connections they have brilliant insights and and you know they can they can offer a perspective

that's sort of zoomed out you know we're so focused on our details and and if you're if you're in certain kinds of games like a cinematic title then it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking oh it has to be so serious it has to be so dramatic you know whatever and you forget that we're just making a game to sell to people for money and so it's good to it's good to just kind of interact with folks who are outside of that particular rat race and understand that you can take information from other sources the power of a liberal education well and that's the but beyond that too it's also a corporate setting does allow for that direct collaboration generative collaboration like I I was freelance for a while in the early 2000s and it was really hard to get adaptive scores done at that point in time because he didn't support was challenging and there wasn't there weren't the technical resources in order to do it not communication resources so I purposely went back

in-house so I could effect change from within because there's certain creative changes I couldn't do as a freelancer that I wanted to do both at Microsoft and PopCap for example now between middleware and communication tools and culture changes it's actually doable now I'm on a project where I'm checking in banks to perforce in on we're communicating on slack and it's great it's like the best of both worlds in a way I just have to reach out for personal communication but it's really nice now which is a segue to our next topic work how does being a member of a team rather than a hired gun help or hinder your workflow when producing game audio so like I was saying if you're in if you're in house and you're a member of the team and it seems to be a lot easier at times to be able to check things in and try it out

and play things people listen to see how they react and be you know and also all the others of the meetings and the you know the reports and all the things you have to have emails etc and political battles you have to fight that can be a lot easier when you're in house as a member of a team at the same time when you're when you're just a hired gun you know it used to be like you say nowadays is getting a lot better because you can do a lot of the stuff you used to be have to only be able to do in house you know like you've used to work at Sony you had to use scream and that was it right and if you were outside you couldn't use it right it's not available but it things have certainly gotten better now but you know the the in the in the bad old days where as a contractor you make sound you toss it over the wall and that's it you know a couple days later maybe you get a build you can see if they got implemented correctly or not or if it still sounds the way you think it should so their advantages and disadvantages of that too just for the workflow of how could you

produced the game yeah I have a comment on that actually not too long ago working with Blizzard as a contractor and since they wouldn't let us run any part of the game remotely it was difficult and also the audio lead had to go in a recording trip for a couple weeks but we couldn't stop working and I asked audio producer you know maybe we should take a hiatus because we're gonna be well if there were like five of us making sounds we're gonna be like sending a lot of sounds in that time he said oh no it's fine we're gonna have somebody else you know listen to them instead and then he's like got a you know approved to do that make that those decisions and of course sure enough he listened to everything green lighted a bunch of it said it was good got some fixes on some things but mostly it was good then the lead comes back and of course like he had a totally different opinion all these sounds and I'm just like oh my god so that was definitely a challenge a contractor in that way where we couldn't put anything in and test it and kind of make our own decisions I think we would have been

better if we could have put our sounds in while the lead was away but since we couldn't it was it was tricky now Damon you're like the pipeline guy yeah I guess I was gonna propose you know is there any hindrance to being in-house when it comes to workflow and tools oh I see is there a negative to it because I think the greatest negative to are the greatest impact to a workflow and tools pipeline is actually being out of house whereas you're if you're in house you have all the toys so it doesn't really well being in house doesn't affect your workflow in tools in that you have them yeah well yeah I mean this is probably what you're about to say but like in terms of things that connecting to the game absolutely if the tools are right there if you have a problem IT is right there and all the other people who maybe made the tool are right there in the building yeah but I suppose one aspect

things you might not have as much control over is your own software I mean you might join a studio where they're just we are a proto-tool studio and that's it or we are a logic studio and that's what you get whereas if you're at home you have the flexibility of picking whatever DW on whatever sample libraries and from that production end you have a little more freedom and and also when you you want to do I know it's a dick because like if there's if there's some kind of tool or pipeline process that you want to do it somehow if I'm just independent of I'm just doing it this way whereas when I'm in house I have to you know not only do the job but sell the job to the people I'm doing it for and then one job's done explaining them how it was done that way and there's a whole process for getting your work approved yeah this is the overhead you're dealing

with it's a lot of overhead well the other thing that was something kick when Karen was talking about working with Blizzard that was in a lot of cases they're not alone that it's still majority particularly larger companies there's a cultural resistance to working and allowing access to builds you know and that's understandable a lot of them get released inappropriately even with VPN and stuff like that so you find middle and smaller companies more willing to open up their pipelines which makes you closer to the team as an independent and able to do a lot of this stuff so the other side of that as well because right now I am doing a wise implementation I do not have access there's no VPN there's no I don't do perforce we think it's oh it's open there's a lot of there are number you know I can't file bugs I got to tell the guy here there's no right what no JIRA exists where we are right now but yeah could be in other words it could be it has been in the past but in this particular case I'm not allowed to

do that and that's a little bit you have a hindrance yes I have seven being in D as opposed to being in the team it seems like it's up to the the game developers realize hey that vary so wildly across studios some of them are very open to I mean when I was working on Lara Croft they literally just gave me a PC and I could just implement however I you know all willy-nilly I could play a level decide that I'm not smart enough to fix this puzzle and then just implement a new music cute for people like me who take forever to solve it and I could just do that and then it's in the game and there we go but then there's other cases where sometimes for secrecy reasons sometimes for technical reasons I just don't have any access to the game it'll I never played Star Wars The Old Republic never I've never played the game despite writing it's cool yeah yeah but because there was just no way to send it out to us and so we just had to go off of concept art and write and some lore documents and that's it so it's just right it's just wildly various but I mean today means point being in-house

means that you probably have the situation in terms of workflow overall now don't you guys all think that it's improved or the lat even five years right yeah the first for the first seven years of my career I was a freelancer working specifically between content and the game as a technical sound designer right so I lived in middleware tools whether they were off-the-shelf or proprietary this was my jam right and I did it remotely as a preference and I was able to be very effective when given the resources that I needed like access to the build access to the tools access to a development platform these were things that I could absolutely do now that became very interesting for me after a time because while I did feel very effective and very able to from the

remote perspective do my job it became increasingly more important to a developer towards the end of their production to actually have me physically on site and so I then ended up spending you know months at a time servicing a developer on site to be closer to the tools to be closer to the team and to be closer to the changes that were rapidly emerging towards finally a game and so you had this like almost race to the finish line where sure working remotely was I was highly effective and highly capable and highly enabled for a period of time but in the rapid acceleration towards you know finishing the game that just wasn't enough yeah cool okay move on to the next topic another easy one money strategies for

maintaining studio gear on Indy rather than a corporate budget now one of the things I mean by this one is and I was talking about this earlier with some folks is this idea that whenever I start a new project I always make or even when I'm building a studio for whatever purpose I always build the studio for the purpose of the project I'm working on so and even when I start a new project if I don't have to build a whole new studio around it then I always always buy a new toy or and plug-in or a new synthesizer or something just so I can have some fun cleaning with these things and I feel I hope that that kind of fun translates into into the work but it's always geared toward the gear is geared towards a specific purpose the specific project that I'm doing so right now I'm doing a mobile mobile game my Pro Tools rig Florida killed it and so I had to build a new system when I got

back to California and so for that I'm doing a mobile game I have no need for a surround system I got no need for subwoofers I got nothing I don't have them I got two really big nice gentle acts but that has bet that's all I really need for a for a mobile game where's the someone to hire me to do work on a surround sound system that I'd go and buy a surround the mixer and a bunch more speakers whereas one of them a building a studio in a corporate environment you kind of want to think about all the possible things you might want to do in a corporate setting and then build for that so like it magically by built a system and again the magically device where you wear in your head there's no surround system there's no subwoofer so I just had a couple of big general mics and that was great for what I was using you for whereas in other situations like a danger I had there was a bunch of different things that I had to do with it and so we had a bunch of different systems and I had like four or five computers in a row in my office in those days for doing

specific things for different parts of the as was being made so how do you guys feel about you know building your own studio versus building your studio on a corporate merger you don't actually have a studio not to sort of self advertise or whatever but in 2016 I did a GDC talk about I think it was just called like triple a virtual orchestration on an indie budget and I went over a bunch of different strategies for basically how to stretch a small amount of dollars as far as humanly possible things like how to work with like live soloists in the most effective ways and so on and so forth but along with that one recommendation I can give especially towards people who are doing more kind of dramatic music orchestra music or whatever is only by sample libraries that are basically the best and if there's a if there's a decision between like oh there's this flapper and I really loved it and it sounded gonna

work so well for you know whatever I'm working on but then there's this one that's cheaper but don't get the cheap just wait until you can afford first off sample library prices often come down unless it's spectrasonics but that's another conversation they often come down and so if you can just hold off a little bit and only buy the ones that really fit for your you know what you have in mind for what you're doing you'll save money in the long run if you orbit awesome yeah exactly where but absolutely absolutely that's true of all gear actually that's true my I'm kind of we all go these phases of gear right when if no matter what we're doing because gear evolves right along with us the technology so I'm into that phase and my motto is fewer more awesome pieces of gear you know my studio is actually kind of doing this in some ways and doing this in others my home studio has always been more capable than the corporate studio I've ever worked in you know except for like the studio not my office that get Microsoft for something

and that's the exception but my home rig has always had more samples and I've often done work at home for work at the corporate side but as an indie it's an actual investment in what you're doing it's a tax write-off it's all of that so yeah it's harder but I think I invest more while I'm an indie for sure you invest more as oh yeah absolutely yeah I want to underline tax write-off well there's a way and while I'm not a tax attorney by any stretch I think we all know that there are opportunities to maximize equipment for self-employed purchases well I'll even go farther than that in that it's the only way I've been able to afford the studio's that I have had when I've had a corporate gig is by running the studio so it's like oh I have a

corporate gig I'm making a bunch of money and the government takes like that much and but then as a side project I'll do like a little project and then I'll spend a bunch of money on gear and then that that amount of money comes off of my corporate taxes and so I get more of a back than I would have otherwise that way the government is actually paying for my gear regular basis over time and that's worked for me around the well now it's different when you're you're only your income is only indie you have to do other tricks that one doesn't quite work and I I'm not sure I've been doing that for a long time but there's ears when I'm Indian there's just when I'm doing the corporate running a thing off I don't know if you would if I were to do that every year for like 20 years in a row the IRS might come after my ass but yeah yeah business has to make money actually Oh a fair certainly ever survey you have to make more and usually by that time I'm in do you get anyway so the way you come of god is is ready yeah but yeah the studio investments one part

of this whole money thing obviously it's it's the investment piece but Karen and I were talking yesterday about the extra costs of being independent and I don't know we're all independent now and I just had to buy insurance from my own my whole family health insurance and that was an eye-opener I hesitate to say the price tag but it's wild what for a family of three what health insurance is come and it's not as good as health and as I had a Microsoft by a longshot so us in the u.s. exactly in the US and as yourself it's part of your so it's a hinder it's a weight on the on the independent community that is actually very real I think it's gonna be it's gonna be real for all Americans at some point but it's in a I know for a fact that that weighs on people's decisions whether to go indie or not in a negative sense right no absolutely no it's certainly more expensive to be in me but it also can be more rewarding and it's

and a lot of times definitely you know I was I was thinking about starting off this session with the line is indie just another word for unemployed because certainly in my case you know there have been times when I've been working anything and then I got reorg doubt or it was just time to go and it's like it wasn't like I had anything to go to so cuz I'm in back to be an indie again you know so it's interesting that way I was just gonna add one thing um what are the strategies I employ since so much of my income does go to medical insurance is um you know I will see what I need for that particular project and then buy accordingly a lot of times like and then of course use that up for tax write-offs as well and then look at where I'm at in the middle of the year like August like do I have to spend more money and if I do I buy more equipment and then again in like November December especially the Black Friday the all the plugins sales right what can i buy and half off or whatever and so I do that and that helps or you know you can also

share with other you know Indies sometimes like sound library when we're not supposed to do it but everybody does you know trade sounds and like you know maybe borrow microphone instead of buying it if you're not going to use it a lot and that kind of stuff helps to cool that's big topic power advantages and disadvantages of being an employee or a contractor when managing office politics now we all know that politics and and selling your job and telling people what you're doing and convicting them to buy in on it is at least 50% of the job if not more a lot of times I say you know doing doing the job is only half of it it's like everything else is part of it even when your employer or a contractor but if you're if you're a contractor you tend to be able to sidestep a lot of stuff you also don't have to go to so many meetings and even when you do go to meetings a lot of times you're you know you're on Google

video chat and so you can kind of put that there and you can just mute the your device you can go do what your other stuff and you know continue doing stuff but if you're in the room you have to be part of the thing even when you don't agree with what's happening or whatever it can be a little more the father's become more important I think when you're in house and when you're an employee all right when you're a contractor agree disagree yeah I mean like I think it's important to make sure that you're as close as possible to whoever your representative is maybe it's the audio director maybe it's a sweet exede provider but try to be not only close professionally but in you know almost like a personal level so that they're really fighting for you because it it is a struggle you know everyone has their opinions especially with something like music one example actually I was the composer and music supervisor for a game called Star Wars first assault and for that one we

budgeted because it was a 75-minute score and I looked at the game and I realized this is multiplayer only and we wanted to have a feel and a vibe and a story to it but there's no single player so I basically said all right well 15 minutes of the music will be just main themes just you know things for the opening menu and it's just a whole playlist of that I don't think I ever would have gotten away with that if I were you know out of house right okay number one it was me making the decisions like do almost whatever the hell I want but right also it was easy to just put it in the game before it's live recorded with you know you know before it cost anyone anything put it in show people what where my mind was at and get their buy-in on it you have you've done that a bunch well no that's one of the again another huge Vantage and why but I have gone in-house so that I could get mentioned earlier leverage right you say the word power but it's more about that

leverage and being that advocate inside the corporation that has to exist in both nematic whether you're out or in but and if you're if you're freelancer you know the person who has that leverage right you're working with an audio director hopefully who has as an independent who has that upstream know-how of the corporate environment and can get to buy-in for audio you know I got good at that and that was to my advantage and I was able to you know allow creative people including myself to do creative things so that's its own thing and you can only do that really from within so to them to the nth degree at least well in what you get when you sign up for that in-house is a myriad of things that mean nothing to someone outside the fence so you you don't have an investment in the company and their success or failure so much you definitely have a commitment to the product and you know your contribution

and and its success but you're not rounding up at the company meaning to hear financial reports about how the company is doing and that's not woven into the fabric of every conversation with every co-worker that you have about the morale or temperature necessary necessarily on a daily basis right and so when you're outside the fence you're like Rach I can do this all and you don't have to deflect the political business that goes on in house with with good cover good leadership in the in house the the freelance folks can really be streamlined and efficient you know and that's key to a good pipeline you know and I I'm just I don't want to embarrass you but I lived in awe of guy when I was working at Microsoft because he got done and I couldn't I personally in my own group I couldn't get anything done I couldn't get anybody listen to damn word I was saying it was very frustrating but you know and and

you started an initiative about plugging in the ideas piece yeah yeah and got it done it was in the Bible boom boom boom boy how did you do that and let me add one more thing you know guy as a manager deflected political for the team that wasn't important and so he was the shield that basically deflected things that were really not a concern on a daily basis right he was a good filter but also you know a transparent communicator of things that would have an effect right that person whoever it is has to have the best creative goals of the game and the company in mind and that that's the key role of of any audio director particularly at a sizable developer publisher you know one thing you were talking about though about dealing with different audio people you know for me a lot of times a lot of times I've been the only audio guy there the people I'm

dealing with our managers and engineers and other people who don't really understand audio at all and the political battle tends to be believe me I know what I'm talking about and and trying to sell the idea of yes this is the way we want to do it even if it's at odds with well that means I happen the engineer has to do a bunch of stuff and I have my schedule a lot of time for and blah blah blah and dealing with those kinds of political issues again it's much it's doable in-house as a contractor you can't reassign the engineers here you need to do this for me and it's gonna take you a week and yeah the contract you can't do that but as in-house you can go to that guy's manager you can go to your magic manager excetera terror to get things done you know Karen you know we're also talking about the different shades of corporate this is kind of where this comes in where I'm hoping that more and more as an independence we can do more of that you know have more of this

creative set as teams become more pickup ball games were to get a game done it looks a little more like I get hate to see it but more of like how a movie gets done and there might be more of that and in that case might there might be less bifurcation between corporate and but the indie might be able to have more input in technical sales for example right like a virtual audio department yeah fills with smaller teams multiple contractors working together with like a developer positive the more they let us into their codebase to do stuff in unreal and unity at that level and script in there we're working by the week or by the day or by the hour and that's a different right different ballgame yeah I think the model of you know the contractors out of the house and well they're you know not here and we don't need to tell them that it's starting to go away thank goodness it's so many times I've had to fight to find things out that I'm like well what we

don't have the latest animations like you know what this changed a week ago we didn't get them like yes I'm often the one that's doing the tracking for the Cotten's of client I find I'm what I should be doing this but I do it because I'm protecting myself and the deadlines and my deliveries and I want them to be happy and but those are services now we can offer that is true so we should start turn that around right and as independence and say well listen there's a you know we have a little fee for that [Laughter] okay final topic hashtag game audio ways you can contribute to the game audion community as an employee and as a contractor Damian here is the game in community in some ways and the hashtag game audio or a hashtag game audio GDC is a way that we can communicate about issues in the in the industry and what's going on

how does being in-house or contractor help or hinder that process have you been both yeah I mean I guess it all Tameka that little disclaimer that people put into their profiles that says something to the effect that these are my personal views and do not represent those of my employer when you are your own employer you don't need that disclaimer right otherwise you are you have a heightened awareness of what is appropriate for you to share and there's just a little more focus on that so that's the first thing I can think of I was yeah I I think there is a difference on some levels not in terms of participation in fact there's strengths and weaknesses but but for certain when you're with the corporation whether

they're in every place I've been has been very open about letting me speak letting me blog even in creative projects but you're still wearing that hat when you come out so it was that Microsoft I a little bit cautious about behavior and things I say just because you know I'm representing a large corporation and now I can go and do anything but the advantage though as you represent a big corporation and you can actually push initiatives and carry a little bit of sway with certain things so there's good and good on both sides I'm gonna tell one over don't embarrass you guy with more story where when I was a independent I used to write this thing called the annoying audio blog which was a series of articles designed to be kind about as outrageous as possible about audio topics and I had gone to a conference and listened to a bunch of the new the new games route and I wrote this rant but why is it that we have

these humongous machines with hundreds of tracks and every all the games still sound like 1950s gladiator music and the same storm and wrong and full choir I've always heard and I published this do you know like cause a little bit mister at one point I think actually BBQ guy took me aside and goes you know that thing you wrote I'm glad you said that because I can't say that but I don't think being in-house or freelance like I don't as far as community participation goes right maybe in a soft environment not necessarily the hard black and white of the online experience I don't feel like having bounced across those barriers in the past years has really changed the way that I approach community from a grassroots level and if anything like you mentioned there there's a even greater responsibility and or power that

comes from having a position in house that you can maybe leverage towards you know space or food budget or you know connections with other Studios you know towards trying to bring community together and so at the same time when you're freelance Wow you might have more time to really pull together things and bring a more diverse experience to whatever community you're participating in and so and so you have a little bit of a balance there between those yeah one thing that Jamie and I were talking about kind of offline was there when you're freelance there's certainly a lot of benefits to being very active in the greater game audio community whereas when you're in-house you're collecting a check no matter what

there's a danger of becoming comfortable yes I'm glad you brought that up yeah well I mean you guys can get expand on this but basically the idea is that you know you have your job you do your job well you'll keep your job hopefully and you know why not go home and why right why go to the extra effort of you know throwing events and participating in the community and it's it's valid but the my take on it is that you have more potential in my opinion you know you have a little bit more power I wouldn't necessarily say responsibility because it's not for everyone and I understand but when you are connected to a company there's more opportunities for you to give back I think and and once again I really have to highlight both PopCap and ArenaNet for opening their doors and actually a bunch of different Seattle yeah companies we have a series of lectures and meetups at the various studios Bungie as well 3 for 3 I think where they've just invited anyone in the Seattle game audio group to just come

and give a lecture and hang out and there's often like food and it's just been a wonderful community that is grown out of this because they didn't become too comfortable and just kind of 9 to 5 it well if you're a freelancer on the other side of it you've got a super vested interest right yeah if you put a flag on the moon for community in your town like all of a sudden people know you there you're the person who is like putting it on the map for people to like get down and you know share their experience or share their knowledge or you're the person who is bringing them to a studio and allowing for an educational opportunity and as a freelancer Wow that kind of thing is great right and so you have a like great opportunity there maybe with the addition of the extra time you might have in-between things to to really do something positive that has a

actually beneficial kind of plus to it I was just gonna say yeah I find that as a freelancer it's essential to be on a more involved in different organizations go to conferences go to meetups and I'm from LA and there's just like always something going on it could like spend my entire week going to different you know VR events and conferences and stuff I have to actually pick and choose because it's low for a while me but that's very been very essential for me because I get most of my work from either people that know me or referrals or people I meet in person at different conferences and stuff so it's been very important you know I'd like to yeah pick up on that and what you were saying about the complacency thing because what I found as someone if there's advice I would give to people kind of going traversing this in-and-out thing is treat your corporate job as if you were

an Indy needing to both grow both your skills and and your people your meeting you're not you know you don't have the for sale sign up but you're you're active and you're not stagnating professionally either you know you're actively seeking out the latest and greatest things what happens in a corporate setting you're often asked to focus on a specific thing and it's easy just a tunnel vision and whether it's management whether it's you know a particular type of area in their sound design work and it's got to remember bring the head up and go look broader and and keep it active because if something comes along like a layoff hmm and you find yourself adrift in the world if you've been engaging with community you might have your finger on the pulse of what's next yeah it's all about the people that's my motto and on that note that's a great ending for that one that was the topics I have we'd like to take some questions from the audience if anybody wants to ask about corporate

and we're Hindi or anything else at all come up to the mic and state purpose thank you for that talk I was bullied in the beginning I apologize Matt but if you haven't already discussed it what are some I guess techniques in giving direction to sound designers who are providing you with sounds in the way that you want to implement them sometimes I have trouble with giving that direction and then I get the sounds I'm like oh it's not the like I want to create different random containers on you know stuff like that so so the question is if you're in and if you're in house how do you how do you deal with contractors give me the sound you sir yeah yeah I have to repeat this I I'd love to just jump in on that real quick because my thought was - oh I'm the one trying to change a culture from within to make the people I work with out of house to be more part of the team

so for instance allowing source control if possible or at least being able to create a wise work unit so that the work is more fully integrated as it comes in that's one of my personal preferences and then you know what you're getting there they're hearing the intention is is already more interlocked yeah on that note I would say shirt template eyes that stuff for folks outside the house even you know let me hand you a work unit or of FEV and you know this is the this is the format shovel your content into these buckets and then redeliver the whole kit and kaboodle right but I think I might have heard something else in that question about like communication of you know creative yeah like how to deliver what formats delivered oh I want one shots do heart loops is this animation going to be doing more bespoke animation you know three-second or do I want like three one seconds to put it you know stuff like that sure communicating elemental systems and

components right and that's a tough one I would say that you the place I would start is establishing the vocabulary you're going to come to a contractor with with the idea right but and you're gonna have a language that would be easy for you to describe that but I think there's a danger in just jumping to it without making sure that the words that you use mean the same as what they hear when you use those words and so I guess it's establishing that vocabulary so that and establishing it early right whether that's a style guide kind of thing where you talk about you know things that it that explained the aesthetic or whether it's the technical side of it when you say one shot or when you say surface only material sound you

know or what is an appropriate amount of silence at the end of a WAV file or a tack you know just again simplify a vocabulary that you you can agree on right and just one thing to add to that naming conventions and having them be really well thought-out are like a gift from God I mean you can be as anal as you want and as a freelancer I love that because it just makes sure that there's no confusion later on and you can easily implement stuff in your game and it just works and there's no there's no I think that almost want to solve a lot of these issues with vocabulary is it just me or does every studio call cut scenes a different thing my favorite polygonal cut scenes or poly cuts Polly wants a cracker Wow say a lot of times on

projects I work on it's sometimes this is printed as Google Docs but that helps just to have everything mapped out in a spreadsheet with what like you know the naming convention is and if it's looping or not looping and like the categories of all the sounds and the material types and everything like because then if there's any question and it's in your contractors are working and it's 2:00 in the morning they can keep going and they don't you know it's good to have stuff written down that's so much work and then they can track you know also if they sent the sound or what you know the feedback and and and all of that if they're waiting for feedback and it just it gets maybe not the same document right and I feel like the level of aptitude should be really high right now out there with people that that are working outside the fence right so that if you do create a prototype system in a middleware tool that's extensible you should be able to hand that to them they should be able to read the tea leaves of it and understand

kind of at a glance what you're doing so I feel like that is a ecstasy of communication if you can just give them that implementation absolutely thank you hello thank you for being here and sharing your collective wisdom so in a corporate job it seems like you have a lot of extrinsic motivation to keep doing your job because or else people will be mad at you and whatnot and same thing if you're actively working on a project when you're indie but I'm curious to hear about how you go about keeping yourself motivated to keep hustling when maybe it's sort of a dry spell and there aren't as many projects going on but you need to keep working and doing your thing anyways just curious to hear your thoughts on that motivation you have a corporate and an indie point of view sure I think it's every good managers obligation to make

sure that their work the workforce the people working for them have something that they're doing at all times all times not just down times that is inspiring to them we I have the one the one thing rule sometimes it's a project called the one thing rule that everybody who was working for me had something that they were like into and whether it was something directly related to a project we were working on usually that was the case it's like I want to do this for this project great that helps us and you get to do the one thing or two things right so you're always doing something that's keeping you in a growth mindset that's the other side make make sure they're always doing something where they're learning something but not in learning some of them that they want to learn even if it's not directly related to their project right and as an indie same deal yeah more so so like there have been times when I've been working on a proud Google and then there was like this lull before you know I'm sure what the next thing was gonna be but there was this low and so instead of trying to generate work I just started doing things that I

wanted to do I started getting more into program you built the game that demonstrated this interactive audio idea that I hadn't seen anyplace else I just wanted to demonstrate it so I could show it to people and that did that wasn't generating money for me but it was certainly flexing my programming skills showing that I knew what was happening in the interactive audio world showing that I was innovative and had some creativity involved and those apps that I then published helped me get the next gig and so yeah it's not there particularly your freelance there is no downtime you're if you're not always working all the time you should be right it's a good time to do some marketing to like go do lunch meetings and more conferences and more meetups and things like that if you have a downtime because that also will help I know for me just I get a kind of isolated working mostly now from my home studio so it's really like a big boost to my creativity and

motivation to go and meet people and talk about what's happening with what they're working on and just kind of get plugged in again kind of like what's happening right now I told my clients I am unavailable this week I am doing this and yeah and I and I think marketing extends to not only you know let's say phone calls emails and meetups but also blog posts tutorial videos you know rocking your resume you know there's there's a whole slew of marketing that I wouldn't maybe consider soft marketing where it's more like you know trying to establish you and your discipline or your company as as someone who knows something I guess yeah and and that kind of marketing can go a long way towards oh a venture allottee of a gig at some point yes so just two

quick things one I would say keep a diary of side projects that you want to do but you have absolutely no time to do so I love Trello I have it on my phone and my computer and everything and whenever I have any idea of I would love to do this but I don't have time just do that you will never go dry because you'll always have something to do and secondly and this is very specific I would I don't know if you had a chance to see this but Anton voltec from gorilla had a wonderful talk about where he basically outlined three different stages of development and I know the generic industry definition is you know you're in crunch mode and you're in whatever but he called them waves and there's different basically he would say okay well you'll be before the wave which is when things are not so busy and he had a great list of things that you can do I think they're applied both to freelance and corporate yeah things you can do when you're not so busy but that'll help you when you're in the wave and you're so busy that you're just okay it's time to time to just work on this and not worry too much about process because

there's no time to deal with that and then after the wave where it's basically boils down to analyzing how you were working during crunch mode or the wave whatever you want to call it and trying to fix things that maybe went wrong or workflow issues or whatever it ends up being I would definitely check that out in the vault whenever it has up yeah exactly it's very prescient here and the last thing I'll just add to that is that if you're in house like maybe you're in production you don't have time to experiment with things but you're gonna be in that wave situation and I would say that probably the thing that one should always return to in those times of question over what is next or what should be done is advocacy like reaching out to other disciplines and departments in house and firming up relationships or creating new relationships that can then continue to carry you through that production process we're about to run

out of time last question Thanks thoroughly enjoyed this and I agree about Anton's talk that was really great I want to revisit it even though got it memorized and repeating my head my question is I came from corporate I've gone freelance and I'm now sort of considering going back in-house and I've come to really love my work-life balance and the freedom that I'm able to create because as creatives it's sort of you have your specific zones during the day where you find I am in it and it's like those are you're on you make those your untouchables and you get so much done I guess my question is related to some of the topics you brought up in terms of politics and then maintaining that work-life balance because that's I guess a fear of mine is going in house and

losing a bit of that so what would be your advice to question and inquire about both the mentor current managers ability to deflect politics as well as the ability to manage your work-life balance and not be sort of slaved to that crunch or burnout so the question being work/life balance from a corporate in their point of view I'm a little bit off the beaten path in that I don't believe there is such a thing I think workers life is life is work and it's all the same stuff to me I don't have a wife and kids or you know other stuff I do on the side so basically if I'm not working I'm not living and in a corporate situation even even then I always try to do I work for me this to end of this time and that's when I'm in this mode I'm in there and then

afterwards I'm doing something else just even kind of let my brain decompress from what was happening during that time I tend to try and do that even when I'm freelance so that it the definition of work and and the oh I'm working now this is my work time and then other everything else I do is life but some of it is even I'm not working so that I can go back to work better I think so that's but that's just me I'm I'm not alright it's interesting that you kind of are more wary of the corporate workplace for work-life balance and I think a lot of nd people would argue that that's a more dangerous place for work-life balance right but you don't really have a choice necessarily I mean it's it's just it kind of is what it is well the yeah you can do your best but that's a certain point it it might be a situation where if you just find that a studio is being kind of toxic where yeah you know making people stay till midnight or whatever and maybe it's time to leave yeah I

would say you do have a choice yeah in some ways yeah remember you're interviewing the corporation as well as they're interviewing you and you have to kind of become aware of what that culture is known for and what it's like and you can make ways to find out that that's exactly what I'm asking for is what's the best ways to kind of fight talk to other people who work there yeah and then actually and you don't do this during an interview it's kind of awkward but but you do your own Intel but from colleagues but then after you get a job then say well how what is this like before I decide now it's my turn to say what is what can I make this I'll share in-house experience just very briefly because ArenaNet is very public about about their work-life balance and so this was something that they were very forthcoming about and definitely something I'm concerned about as someone who's in-house and again I think when you find a company who is willing to say yeah work-life balance we get it right I

think you've found a mature company that's willing to accept responsibility for that I and what that means for a schedule and for a culture so I would say demand it we are out of time thank you all so much I want to did you see [Applause]