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Audio
20 Years of Forza Motorsport - An Audio Retrospective
May 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox. In a fascinating look behind the scenes, Nick Wiswell, the Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios for the last 15 years will re-visit some hugely important moments in his journey. Drawing out universal lessons learned, he’ll explore the evolution and management of the creative process, deep dive into some technical audio innovations and discuss some of the community interactions that have helped keep Forza at the forefront of gaming for two decades and counting.
Session Takeaway
- A history of Forza Motorsport including key innovations in the franchise with an audio focus
- A Retrospective including key learnings on the audio creative, technical and production processes that have been used over the last 20 years at Turn 10 and how they have evolved or changed
- A deep dive into a couple of key audio features from previous games
- How to work with a community of players to build trust and respect
Behind the Sounds of Star Wars Outlaws
In this talk, Massive Entertainment's Jacob Coles, Lead Audio Designer, and Martin Weissberg, Principal Sound Designer, will be taking you through the development process behind Star Wars Outlaws. Starting the presentation with how to stand out within a galaxy of references and forming creative pillars, they will also explore the goal of creating authentic immersive worlds, how they approached the sound of a scoundrel in the galactic underbelly, and how it all came together in the mix.
Session Takeaway
- Learn how Star Wars Outlaws found it's place in the universe
- Hear how the team used field recording and snowdrop tech to provide virtual tourism
- Insights into crafting the scoundrel, Kay Vess through her foley, toolbox, and vehicles
- A peek behind the curtain of the mix, showing what approaches were used
Finding an Angle: How to Boost Your Audio Creativity and Originality
Veteran audio director, sound designer and acid house pioneer, Suddi Raval, takes a journey through concepts of creativity and originality examining why original audio content is so important and how to foster the right mindset to achieve it more easily. What are the barriers to frictionless flow when finding ground-breaking game sound and music approaches, and what are practical steps you can take and rules you can break to open the door to true creativity and originality.
Session Takeaway
- The case and inspiration for striving to create more original audio
- Why we find it hard to step outside of our comfort zone
- How to train your brain to push the limits of your creativity
Making the Lives of Audio Designers Easier in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
Game development is an incredibly collaborative industry, where professionals from widely varied backgrounds come together to create something fantastic. Audio designers have a very important role in creating an immersive experience for the player with sounds, music and VO. The role of an audio programmer is to smooth out and optimize the pipeline from sound creation to implementation in-engine, so audio designers can focus on the creative part of the process. In this behind-the-scenes look at the production of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2’s award-winning audio, Siddhant Ravi will talk about some of the systems he implemented, the thought process behind them, the results and benefits, as well as things that could be improved upon. He’ll reflect on the value of cross-discipline understanding and collaboration, and how it led to innovations which exceeded both designers’ and programmers’ initial expectations.
Session Takeaway
- Gain some ideas and inspiration to customize the Wwise integration with the game engine to suit the audio team’s needs.
- Learn about some of the systems implemented to achieve the audio vision in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.
- Understand the importance of familiarizing yourself with the workflow of audio designers to better understand their needs during development as an audio programmer.
Optimising the Music Commissioning and Creation Process For Games
Whether you are a developer or a composer, most of us muddle through creating the music experiences for our games with a process based on received wisdom and the school of hard knocks. But so much of the received wisdom is flawed, and what works for one composer or client doesn't necessarily work with another. To help you navigate these issues, Kenny Young has put together a nose-to-tail analysis examining many of the fundamental aspects of commissioning, directing and collaborating to create music experiences for games. With over 20 years of experience on both sides of the fence creating critically acclaimed and commercially successful games, Kenny is expertly positioned to give holistic insight that will benefit attendees of all experience levels.
Session Takeaway
- Learn how to hire the right composer for your game and give them the best chance of success
- Gain insight into the realities of music direction rather than the PR-centric "elevator pitches" encountered in presentations and post-mortems
- Understand key variables throughout the process and the impact they have so you can adapt to different contexts and take them in your stride
Reading Between the Lines: Integration of Sound, Narrative and Design into Dialogue
Go on a deep dive into how the role of Dialogue Designer came to be, and what it can encompass. This talk will explore how Dialogue Designers at Sony Creative Arts approach projects from a creative, practical and technical perspective, and provide insight on what our dialogue integration processes consist of, depending on the current tools and workflows in place. We’ll refer to practical examples from recent games such as Helldivers II and Until Dawn Remaster to take a peek at some of the tools we used and decisions we made in terms of dialogue pipeline integration.
We’ll discuss at which points on the development cycle Dialogue can have a direct or indirect involvement, and how there can be some discipline overlaps and dependencies with Sound Design, Narrative and Game Design that can greatly impact the overall soundscape of a project.
And finally, we’ll talk about how having knowledge of, and even dipping your toes into other disciplines can be greatly beneficial for your skillset, and your personal and professional development.
Session Takeaway
- Learn about the overlap between Dialogue Design, Sound Design and other game development disciplines and how they differentiate and complement each other
- Discover how we do Dialogue Design within Sony, providing an overview of our general workflows, and some of our tools and pipelines together with the reasons why we work the way we do
- Be inspired to experiment within game development in order to “find your thing”
