Organisation & Pipelines In Game Audio
Overview
Game developers have set budgets and timelines they need to adhere to - at the end of the day, when the money runs out, people can’t continue to work.
This money can come from a number of different places: investors, publishers, or the studio itself, using money earned following the success of a previous game. Scheduling the development process, however, can be a very hard thing to do, as there are a lot of factors that can impact development, and it can be hard to predict exactly how much of an impact they may have.
A key part of scheduling is accounting for all of these factors and trying to map them onto a simple timeline with milestones and deliverables for each stage of development. The most common reason why games are delayed is that the planned timelines didn’t match up to the reality of the work, for whatever reason.
Unfortunately, delays usually mean more money is required to continue funding development, and pushes back the date when the game can be sold and begin to recoup its budget, so publishers or studio heads sometimes make the decision to release games that aren’t yet finished, instead of delaying the game’s release. This, as you might expect, leads to a lot of stress for the developers.
Why am I telling you all of this? Simply put, because games are made in the real world, where there is a lot of uncertainty and change that we have to adapt to. Important people might leave the team at crucial moments of development; budgets might be cut or features added that need extra work without the deadline being extended.
With that in mind, proper organisation is essential to mitigate the impact of these unforeseen problems and keep our heads above the water.
How To Get Organised & Stay Organised
Organisation is an ongoing process, but it starts from day 1: in pre-production, where the overarching schedule for the entire game’s development is mapped out. Each team (audio, art, animation, programming, etc.) has milestones with tasks they have to complete. The dates of these milestones are set during pre-production and may vary in frequency depending on the studio and publisher.
Some studios like to have a lot of smaller, more frequent milestones, for example ‘sprints’ that last for two weeks to a month, while others may prefer to have larger milestones with longer deadlines (for example every three months). The deliverables for these milestones can be split up and tracked in a way specific to the game, such as levels, quests, areas, characters, weapons, etc.
For example, a milestone for an audio team using levels to split the milestones might look like this:
All Foley recorded for cutscenes for levels 2-6
Foley implemented for cutscenes in level 1
Dialogue treated and implemented for levels 1-2
Sound effects first pass for levels 3-6
Music first pass levels 1-2
Ambient system set up for levels 1-6
Ambience first pass level 1-3
As the development cycle progresses, the schedule is adjusted and so are the milestones. This is done through lots of back-and-forth communication between the individual teams, their leads and the producers.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are the glue that holds projects together and enable good organisation in the first place. They are wildly underrated and one of the most essential tools in game development. Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are the two most common spreadsheet tools. My preferred one is Google Sheets as it’s free, saves everything automatically and allows collaborative editing in real-time.
Here is a quick beginner tutorial on how to use Google Sheets: https://youtu.be/FIkZ1sPmKNw
Tracking
Tracking helps teams (as the name suggests) ‘stay on track’ by maintaining an overview of current and future tasks, bugs, and the timeline in which they have to be completed.
I personally find it very useful to track the progress of my own tasks independently, as it helps me keep my head clutter-free and see the bigger picture. In fact, I used Trello a popular Kanban-style list-making application to structure the topics of this site and log my progress.
Other popular applications used for tracking projects include:
Jira (for bug tracking & agile project management)
Trello (Kanban-style browser-based app)
Asana (work-management platform for organisation and tracking similar to Trello)
Miro (whiteboard-style application with presets that let you organise your project and brainstorm in whatever way you see fit)
Pipelines
A pipeline is a sort of high-level, ‘macro’ way to view the different parts of a project. For example, the ‘Audio Pipeline’ would describe the entire process of creating sound for a game, made up of all the smaller tasks and processes involved in doing so, from the initial meetings discussing creative direction, through designing and implementing sounds, to the final bug fixing and QA stages.
You could also have smaller pipelines within that for sub-categories of audio, such as Foley, dialogue, or music pipelines, that would encompass all of the processes involved in each discipline and eventually feed back into the main audio pipeline. Take the Foley pipeline, for example: this would involve researching and compiling lists of all the required assets, capturing the various animations and cutscenes that will have Foley in them, recording the Foley and editing/synchronising it to these cutscenes, and then finally implementing the finished assets into the game.
The tools we use are also part of the pipeline they include things like middleware, batch import tools, spreadsheets and other custom-coded or developed tools. Each pipeline is unique to the discipline that it covers, and usually improves slightly over the course of a game’s development, becoming more efficient and better-suited to the development team. Pipelines are often improved further after shipping, based on the lessons the team has learned from what worked and what didn’t during development.
You will naturally learn a lot more about this from first-hand experiences during your career but if you want a more in-depth overview then I would highly recommend reading this short article: https://www.asoundeffect.com/game-audio-pipeline/
Why are they useful?
Thinking with pipelines allows us to look at the overall development process holistically and make improvements. This often involves a lot of communication with other disciplines, as audio is heavily reliant on art, animation and VFX, but also design and narrative as well as of course production (the discipline that manages overall organisation for the entire team/project).
Improving how we give and receive information to and from the different teams we work with is a challenge, but it makes a huge difference in the long run. By actively developing our pipelines, identifying and removing bottlenecks, and strengthening what works, we increase the efficiency and quality of the end result. That’s why it’s important to observe and learn what is working and what isn’t.
Communicating
This is hands-down one of the most important aspects of the job, and one that is often overlooked. Like any other skill, you will get better at it with time, but here are some tips to speed up the process:
Be friendly - this is the most obvious thing, but worth being reminded of.
If an exchange is more than 5 messages arrange a meeting or a call. It will save both of you time and avoid misunderstandings.
Use clear, plain language if you don’t fully understand the technical lingo. You might mean one thing but accidentally say something else because you picked up a false term from someone.
Use visual aids like whiteboards, drawings, pictures, and videos to bring your ideas and points across more easily.
