September 8, 2022

How I got into Game Audio

I only graduated and started looking for work in games a couple years ago, so I absolutely understand what someone new to the field wants to hear as a response to "How did you get into the industry?" You want to hear a simple step by step, 'this is how you do it!' guide, but it never is that simple. Everyone has their own story and wacky combinations of hard work and opportunity to get where they are now. So while there's never a clear 'JUST DO THIS,' there absolutely is value in hearing people's stories and looking at some of the common things people did in their journeys.

For me, my interest in sound started when I heard the notorious Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites dubstep track at a friend's 16th birthday party. Hearing those gnarly sounds got me really interested in electronic music until it wasn't good enough to just collect it, I felt a need to make it myself. I remember downloading Adobe Acid and some dubstep loops and attempting to remix a track my friend Trenton made who was a local DJ. I showed him when I finished and he introduced me to FL Studio, and the basics of making electronic music. I worked with FL for a while before switching over to Ableton and got much more comfortable making music and specifically because I was making electronic stuff, I gained experience with synths and heavy plugin manipulation.

I was getting close to graduating high school and realised I wanted to keep on this electronic music path and ended up attending Northeastern University for their Music Composition & Technology major with a Minor in Music Recording. I learned A LOT about sound during my time there. I learned traditional western tonal composition, how to make musique-concrete/acousmatic works, how to record, mix, and master bands, live sound, etc. So much! There was never any sort of games class though, and when my roommate, an artist, would do Global Game Jam, I'd just go check in with him and bring him food. I didn't even consider participating, surely game audio was too hard and I didn't think for a second I could do that.

In my final semester, I took a sound design elective and it is the first time I learned about foley, composing to picture, cutting sounds, and more. I fell in love with it instantly and quickly found myself at Savannah College of Art & Design doing their MFA in Sound Design program. In the first few quarters I learned a lot about field recording, sound design for film and animation, and dialogue editing, and then we had a choice of elective. I chose the game audio elective.

The SECOND I opened Unreal and dropped a positional in the world it was like everything just clicked. "Oh...I can do this!" Game audio wasn't just unintelligible lines of code on a page and I NEVER realised that! I was thrilled by Unreal and made sure to do as much game audio work as I could in my last year. I stayed in close contact with my game audio professor and become a teaching assistant for the game audio and immersive audio classes. I spent a lot of time digging into unreal and Wwise making sure I knew how to use them decently. I also took Berklee's Intro to Game Audio online class just to get more experience in and learn about using Unity + FMOD and attended GameSoundCon 2019. I then did my thesis on Designing Sound for Video Game Implementation which I wrote for someone who was in my shoes the previous year —someone who knew about audio but nothing about game audio.

While finishing school I was working on my sound design chops and building a network on Twitter. There are so many wonderful game audio people on twitter and I got to know them by checking out their work, commenting and asking questions. I remember that the talented Joshua Davidson was one of the very first people I started talking to! I was a curious student with a passion for sound and I think people saw that and were happy to chat. As I was getting close to graduating I applied for Sony's Dialogue Video Game Sound Internship and got it after a looong interview process. Everyone at school was sent home for Covid and I finished my last quarter from my parents house here in LA and graduated in my room.

I was ready to begin the Sony internship until I got a call saying because of Covid, it was being postponed to the next year...so now here I was, a new grad, and no job. I started the job search and worked on my reel. Then one of the sound designers I had talked to most, the incredible Juan Pablo Uribe reached out to me when Chris Kokkinos, the then audio lead at Rooster Teeth asked him if he knew anyone who might be able to help out with what about to be a busy time of the year as they were going to have to put out new episodes of Red Vs. Blue and RWBY at the same time. Juan reached out to me because he had seen a redesign I did of a Warframe cinematic and though my style would fit. I ended up interviewing with the Rooster Teeth team after Chris reviewed my work.

This began my first official sound design job! I learned so much during that time especially when it came to designing quickly and working with a team. After finishing my contracts with Rooster Teeth, it was time for my postponed Sony internship to start...except Covid was still a thing and it was cancelled. Thankfully, I had a good relationship with my recruiter and she offered to send my resume out to other teams at Sony. I was put in touch with Steven Osman who runs the Magic Lab Dept. at Sony. Magic Lab is essentially R&D where they look at new technologies, create demos, and see how it could benefit Sony. I apparently made a good impression during our call because he hired me to come work for Magic Lab instead.

There I played a more technical role than just sound designing. I worked to create and implement audio for in house demos and made my own Unreal demos from scratch integrating tech we were looking at with audio concepts. My time at Magic Lab was so much fun, and taught me to be self-sufficient and to get the hang of rapid prototyping. I liked to think too much, just DO the thing and then let's see how it works!

As I was finishing up with Magic Lab, Chase Thompson, technical audio lead at 343 Industries reached out to me on linked in saying that had a contract position open for working on Halo Infinite. He had found me from my presence on Twitter and LinkedIn and thought I would be a good fit. I went through the interview process there including a big 2hr interview with a total of 7 different members of the team and came out with a job offer!

So here I am 1 year into working as a Technical Audio Designer at 343 Industries working on my first shipped game, Halo Infinite! I am so grateful for all of the people who have given me their support over the years and there is so much kindness and willingness to share in game audio. We all want to see each other succeed and that's why I love this space!

December 30, 2020

We've had a few nights of rain here in LA, so I put my recorder out to grab a solid take of rain hitting the patio umbrella in our backyard.

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August 13, 2020

I just grabbed the Rode NTG5 and took it for a spin recording me shaking all the salt & pepper in my pantry (and even some panko and bay leaves cause I was feelin' wild).

August 21, 2019

I went around my house and recorded a bunch of clicking sounds from whatever items I had lying around and got a good number of samples from it.

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