It was quite an experience getting to see the people at the top of their game in the world of game sound!
The event started with a presentation from the audio director from Tencent games all the way from China, Cheney Wu, where he talked about mobile games, their huge and growing chunk of the video games market, and techniques for adapting and optimizing big screen console games to small screen mobile environment, with examples from Call of Duty mobile and Arena Valor.
The second part of the event was the presentation of Perttu Lindroos, senior audio programmer, and Martin Bussy-Pâris, senior technical audio designer from the audio team of Remedy Games from Finland, with examples from their impressive work on their games Quantum Break and upcoming games Control. Quantum Break with all its time manipulation seemed like a big enough of a challenge for the sound designers, which they had masterfully came over with designing their own in-house granular synthesis utility to deal with smooth stretching and playing sounds and music backwards and forwards, and oh boy, the game was packed full of audio elements placed all around the environment! But the major Wow-moment for me came with their second part of their presentation about Control in which the environment is itself constantly in motion and change, so they had to come up with even new tools like a spinning ray-casting system to deal with the huge array of sound sources, many not actual ones and more related to feels and the emotion of that particular area. Equally impressive was their attempt at generative music composition, with real time synthesizers and varying time signatures and beat accents.
Boy, I’ve got a LOT to learn!