Zen and the Art of Game Audio Maintenance

[Music] [Applause] so let me tell you a story that occurred let's say ten years ago I was working on Killzone 2 at the time and in this particular moment I was working on the multiplayer ambiences so you know making boxes in Maya making ambiences and putting them into the game and running through them and just like oh this transition works nice pootis both sound there you know kind of the sound gardening it's really beautiful and then at one point I hear this strange high-pitched weird sound somewhere and then it was gone so didn't think too much of it we were working hard you know

it's like hard def time we focused and just excited to be working on a title that was much anticipated so a lot of energy but also a lot of hard work so we're getting a little bit tired and then continued working a little bit later I hear it again this is kind of strange I tried to figure out what it could be I look at the debug screens that we have I try to look at the sounds that I just added didn't are all the way foul still okay is there some where's our ignition there are the converted versions of them alright you know and all the stuff you do to figure out what could be going on and and then at a certain point it was gone again so and I couldn't reproduce it I tried to do to all the same places that I went to before I tried to repeat my actions try to remember what might possibly be is but it didn't happen again so I decided I'm just gonna go down to the canteen we have a nice little

canteen at the time at the basement of the office and we had a chef there during crunchy times and he would cook great food so enjoy the meal I come back to my room and open the door and hear the sound again so I go sit behind my desk and it turns out that my game is turned off so alright it's it's not any game that that was good news and since because at least you know I didn't have to worry about it too much in being in the ship title but still I think I had a problem so you start to look at you know is window still running fine is there a driver conflicted like ten years ago right so um go to the amp and the Deaf get is it alright yeah everything's fine well then my life sound engineering background kicked in I used to work in a in a small theater and it sound there and I started to follow the cables right so is the cable from the difficut to the

amp alright yes is that and the signal coming through there great start to follow the speaker cable and it seemed to always be coming from the the front of the of the sound field so I started with the left front speaker and then jangled it a little bit and then I went to that Center speaker right there and I went underneath the desk with my hand and I touched the cable and it was sticky and I smelled it oh the smell really really bad so that made me really curious and I I went underneath the desks oh my god I'm a bit tall and there's pretty cramps and trying not to knock over the speakers or the monitors but I went underneath and I followed the cable up and I'm following the cable up and I go up to the backside of the speaker you know that's the baseboard right there and as I approached it I hear this weird sound and solely a family of mice appeared so I had some roommates is those crunchy times and we

were in a very old office from the 17th century it's a very great building but it was getting kind of funky so welcome this is zen and the art of game audio maintenance this alloy in what I suspect is some kind of pose related to this topic I'm Anton Baltic I'm celebrating twelve and a half years in game audio this year and yeah it all started actually right here in this room twelve and a half years ago I still remember it as if it happened five minutes ago these days though I'm a principal sound designer at girly games and I've been working at earlier games for the past eleven years and during those 11 years in contrary to a previous speaker I shipped four games not a hundred but there were nice games though Killzone 2 like I was saying then on the

PlayStation 3 Killzone 3 also on the PlayStation 3 then the launch title for the PlayStation 4 Killzone Shadowfall and then the last game we released last year horizon zero dawn and but what I was gonna say is I'm not a Zen monk I am NOT a Buddhist I don't know much about philosophy but about four years ago I read this book by a guy called Robert Pearson and I was reading this book at the time that I was preparing a GDC talk about Killzone Shadowfall and it really resonated with me in ways that were like fundamental to Who I am and I it took a little while to recognize what it was but I realized the book when it came out or in the 70s it influenced a generation particularly here in San Francisco I would say but all around the world

significantly in in so many ways but it influenced my parents generation and I think probably for a lot of people in the room with their parents generation was influenced by it and it's it's a difficult book to describe in this talk so I'm not really going to do that but one particular thing that caught my attention was how he talks about our relationship with techno and as I was doing this talk about the no craft system for Killzone Shadowfall I started to reflect upon my relationship with technology and start to think about things that might be shared between all of us working in game audio so talking about that our relationship with game audio over with technology I would say we love it because the game is technology right it enables our creative ambitions we wouldn't be here without these high tech dreams that we have and it shows you

know in how we treat technological objects as almost religious artifacts you know I've got my modular synthesizer that I'm obsessing about and spending way too much time and money on Damien's got his pedal boards that is raving about industry I'm sure a lot of you have plug-ins that you consider somewhat the Holy Grail or something you know but in any relationship where there's love there can be hate because whenever you have something that doesn't do doesn't deliver what you want to achieve creatively where your ambitions are then you can get really frustrated and angry with them and when you are you know such as us at the cutting edge of technology with games that happens all the time also important in a relationship is trust that is key without trust you can never have any kind of good relationship so put a pin on that for a second and let's talk a

little bit about ambitions in games because I think games are really unique in that we have three three really important ambitions first of all like I was saying technology right we're pushing that technology to the very very edge and there's so much fun to be riding that edge is really inspiring but also we have these creative ambitions we want to make people cry when they play our games or whatever reaction we get out of them that's also a really strong ambition a lot of us have and of course you know we have kids and we want to eat and we want to in a nice place we want to have stability so our games have to make money we're doing this also as a sustainable financial endeavor and you can never forget that too and I think you know when I think of this and I look at that I know where I can place myself on that map I can put myself somewhere in that triangle and say this is where where I will balance

these three things for myself um and also the game I'm working on I can put on that map I can say the game I'm working on is also trying to achieve something here and it might be true for you as well and sometimes there is a discrepancy there you know sometimes where we are and where our core ambitions are fundamentally as humans is radically different from the jobs that we have and where they want to go with that and that sometimes can create large tensions especially if you're not aware of it I think as long as you're aware of the thing you're working on being something fundamentally different from where you are then you can find ways to deal with that another thing is that you have your ambitions the game as those emissions but you're not doing this alone right games is this hyper collaborative process where you're constantly together making this it has

no real creative owner for a game everybody is contributing so much to it so everybody on the team is putting their dot somewhere - and it might not be always in the same place as yours so that creates company culture I think again this is my bird's-eye view from from these twelve and a half years and maybe there's different from yours but maybe some stuff resonates well with you so um what I find is that you have culture and game companies somewhere in between the rock band and law firm slider you know on the one hand the extreme you have the studios that are all about creativity no rules just go and whatever you need to do to achieve that ambition and the other hand you have Studios that are really structured and have all kinds of defined processes

and that's what gets their day in games out of the door in time right and you can put all kinds of markers on kinds of pluses and minuses that those company cultures bring but again it's one of those things where if you know what your company culture is and you can see it clearly and you know what parts of it you like and don't like you can also relax a little bit more you can think about that and say okay this is going on but that's because this company is here and that is also something that made me think for a second because these are all kind of static these things change slowly over time but you can say for any moment during game development they're kind of static game development has States and the ones who own in the States of game development right now is the production team because the a defined pre-production production and maybe even a little bit of Polish time right but

that is not my experience that those clear defined periods are not how I perceive the times I've spent making games I see it more as a wave oh sorry about that I see it more as a wave so for me at a certain point I come into the office and suddenly I'm tense all my muscle stands up and I go what's going on this didn't happen yesterday nothing bad happened on the way over here everybody said hi what's going on and then it turns out soon enough that I'll figure out wait a lot of people around me are working very hard and getting very focused and the energy changes and that's when I notice know that a wave is going to come so a wave has these three stages the the the pre wave period where you kind of sieve stuff building then you're fully in it you're focusing focusing focusing and in

a certain point it crashes on the ocean or on this beach and it apps out and what's important to realize and this is also about that feeling thing is that not everybody you're working with is gonna be in the same state at the same time some people are much further out as see and you are and they are working on things you have no real sense of particularly in sound I think because we're so far at the backend of projects and you can also have multiple waves during a project so you know sometimes there but sorry but you can have multiple ways but there's usually also one that is like the big one the one that defines the project but there will be the ìiî demos and the things that just like wash over you as well but let's take a little bit of a closer look so we can I know it is this kind of let's take a bit of a closer look to the the period before the wave comes right this spirit is highly chaotic it's

highly chaotic because there are so many questions you cannot answer this is what game am I making why is this thing there is it gonna be there in the end but you know that you have to have as many answers as possible because as soon as you are in this wave period you're gonna rely on those answers to inform your work now during wave there is also chaos a lot of it actually and it comes from deadlines scope changes unexpected changes all these external factors that you cannot control the only thing you really know during this time is that there's no way you're gonna do everything that he wanted you those three ambitions that we talked about in the beginning they are fighting for your attention and during this time is impossible to really achieve all of them and that's also really good to be

aware of I found so during this time my focus starts to narrow deeply I start to focus on the particular task I'm working on like making an ambient and testing the immunes and that is that just happens right but because of that your communication skills start to decrease because your focus is so much on what you want to achieve that communicating about those things becomes harder and harder and it goes for more people in the company that you're working for another thing that happens is that your perception changes you're focusing so much only one particular thing or can things or whatever that sometimes you get these gaps in your perception and issues that were that easy to spot when you were not in this time are somehow escaping your attention and they can suddenly hit you when you least expect them so that

sounds may be a bit of a downer but actually this is the time where you get to achieve your ambitions and that is the nice part about this this is where you get all the energy from to really achieve that dream that you have for whatever you're working on now then the wave passes in whatever form that might happen and one thing that will happen is your audience will react and that reaction is chaotic you don't know how they're gonna react they could be positive negatives there could be all kinds of things that you never thought of but the certainty that you have from the chaos is that you're gonna get lots of new information from so many players is really gonna inform the work that you've done so I said I would also make it a little bit more practical and so I wanted to share some of the things that I've found that can help me in these three different stages states of a

project in the pre wave period I found it critical to verify my signal chain so what I mean by that is first of all and roll it out as detailed as possible this is this is a bit of a rough sketch of you know your game engine going into your defecate going into and going into your ad converter this is a particular example for my current setup going into your Mari router etc etc until it reaches your brain and make this as detailed as you can possibly make it go out and describe every step in your game audio engine and then put a test sound at the start I might suggest a pink noise at minus 12 DB full-scale play at the beginning and then get towards the end and see if it still comes out the same way I suspect for a lot of people in a room that might not be the case some processes in between will change the signal will make it softer or might

even change the frequencies keptin because of phase cancellations of all kinds of things can happen right there's so many so many things in between so when that happens don't panic just try to figure out where could it come from and try to take out steps so play the sound directly from your amp is the pig noise working directly from your amp great and it's not everything behind it it must be before it right at a certain point and this might take half a minute if you're lucky or it might take months as was my case after Killzone 3 and the amount of bugs we found in our engine by simply doing this was staggering and funny because we're in this pre wave period right we could just do this in our leisure e pace so once you've done that and you have a certain confidence calibrate it you know minus 12 DB full-scale pink noise should be a certain amount of DB SPL on your

speakers in your room 78 for example whatever works for you I don't think there's one number that should be adhere to what that gives you is something to recalibrate to and recalibrating recalibrating regularly is well builds trust that's what we want taking it a bit further what if you take that ping noise and then trigger it directly from the game so you don't need your audio tools to trigger it you just have a debug menu in your game and all it does is trigger a sound that is your calibration signal what that gives you is the ability to test your setup somewhere else you know this signal now right you've calibrated your studio so you know how it should come back now we can go anywhere in the dev team and see if it actually represented

the same way there recently for example I was in our review space which is a nice little cinema for 12 people great surround setup and we were reviewing the game in the current state and we were felt like something is off in the front field again and we were discussing was the dismay exchange that make sense now that doesn't make any sense at a certain point I had the clarity of mind figure let's just play the test and the test sound is simply a white noise or pink noise panning around the full circle as soon as it reached the left phone speaker it was dull what happened the tweeter of the speaker had long that saved us hours of debating what it could be it was hard to perceive a tweeter being blown on a full range giant power and Wilkin system and now it was that easy but only because we could trust this test signal because we knew it so well

the third thing in the pre wave period you can do is two and then Phi and engage your allies within the team so I think there's three different kinds of allies that I like to have and the first one is a wicked repair magician so this is the special person who can just magically find the way to reproduce that issue from happening that you haven't been able to find out for the last game that happened to be my intern Nick who have was a magician for doing this with weapon sounds and our game director Matthias young who would come with the most beautiful music bugs that haunt me still you also need somebody with a very sharp analytical mind so somebody that can jazz you can give a logic issue and then instantly tells me yeah but you missing that step there that can save you so much time the third one I need is a trusty creative

ear now again this doesn't need to be a sound person this somebody who's creative opinion you trust and you built this relationship during a pre wave period because as soon as you go into the wave period and you get hyper focused in your communication skills decrease then finding somebody that you trust and explaining the issue or just hearing their feedback and really receiving it it's very hard unless you they already have some kind of relationship with you and you understand each other so see if you can get these kinds of people around you so the wave hits you and I'm sorry to say there's not a lot of things you can do I found but what I noticed happens is at some point I'm working hard by my desk this is it my current studio happily tapping away and suddenly I hear something wrong and my instinct tells me at this point quick run I need help so before you do

that realize you are hyper focused some people call this maybe flow state either way your your your instincts are sometimes misleading you take a second and ask yourself some questions and I'm going to very quickly run through some suggestions and I promise I will upload my slides do is their signals change still calibrated are you missing something obvious what does my content do how is my content being triggered and what does the debug tell me and could the debug be lying to me it does when did you hear something similar and now who are you going to talk to about this why are you going to talk to that person about this and what would she do or tell you how stressed mi what is my weakness and what is my strength good things to ask yourself

before you run off in a hurry the reason for that is of course those other people are also hyper focused likely so you're taking away from their chance to reach their ambitions so be mindful of that so then there's some things you can do just let some time go by right just let some time go by it might it might become clear or just capture it and play it back that gives you a new perspective to start over from a blank canvas works great for logic issues throw it away get a cup of coffee come back try again read the revision history in perforce that is such a goldmine of information in there what you see is not what you hear or the other way around so turn off your screen and just listen or turn off your speakers and just watch because those eyes and those ears they influence you in ways that your brain

doesn't know about it happens subconsciously so just separate them and sometimes that gives you really important clues of what might be going on isolate your problem as much as possible get away as much of the poor other things around you so put it into a test level with absolutely nothing get rid of anything else attached to it have that one trigger in there and if then you know it's still not solvable reboot okay and then you can go talk to somebody the other thing that I like to do sure is to keep a log of what I do so every day I just as I do things I just type out worked on this sound talk with that person very short not details just type it up and then when I notice a gap

in my perception so I have an issue that eluded me for a while and it was like why didn't I really realize that sooner I write down this is the issue I had a photo shoot noticed this sooner file away forgive yourself move on this is your time to reach your goals don't worry about it is waste of time at this point we'll come back to it later so it crashes ashore right and when you're working on a deadline you don't always make the nicest assets the players don't mind they don't care if you're why sounds are all horribly named or if my graph sounds looked like a horrible mess of wires they don't care but you should care for yourself on the next project if you're gonna maybe reuse those assets because those are the assets then give me give you bugs on the next project and you're gonna hate your old self for not cleaning up when you still have plenty of time so refactor them wrong way if

you're not gonna use them anymore but get rid of the craft now the second thing to do in a post wave period is to look at the bugs that you've marked for this thing on your list and then start to design ways to help yourself find these bugs sooner you know help yourself and create processes that do that now you might notice that what I'm talking about now is something that you could apply to that signal chain thing that I was doing and the test sound thing all these things come from these kinds of processes and it was already happening naturally for me but once I started to reflect on it it really made me realize how important it is and important to realize it's good to focus on the things that make sense in the state that you're currently in it doesn't make sense to worry about your processes or your signals Jane too much when you're in a wave period just roll with it

and go you've got the tools you build before you got to live with it now make it work but don't forget about the issues you have in during the wave period because it's so easy and you don't realize this when you're so focused you think this is so important I'm never gonna forget it it was so terrible it was so terrible but as soon as the wave is over it's all gone I don't remember any of the painful stuff I had to endure during any of the projects I did because as soon as it's out it's all forgotten and forgiven it's not a thing anymore so write it down with a little note and then you remember oh yeah that was really terrible and then you start to design processes to prevent you from being in the same boat again you want to have a better boat so what I would love to hear is other people's my stories and I hope this dog gives you a chance to maybe be a little bit more Zen in your daily work thank you [Applause]