Recently on ISC we saw a number of new creature concepts like the space whale, the space cow and the microTech bear. Do you provide concept sounds along with the concept art as part of the approval process, or do you wait until the final creature is designed before you begin on audio?
TL;DRAudio doesn't currently provide concept sounds; concept artists have the final say, and there's no creature pipeline yet, with who makes creature sounds still to be worked out, though collaboration is hoped for.
That's an interesting question. I mean, honest answer, this is new ground for us. So I think concept artists do have the final say over what's going to happen to the concept. So we don't tend to input to that. And I think that makes sense because the visual really does drive what you think a creature is going to sound like.
It would be really interesting, though, to think about how a future space creature could vocalize, and whether there were any physiological specialities to it that mean maybe it's got a huge trumpet or something and it might sound trumpety.
Of course, being able to communicate in vacuum if it's the whale, or on a planet with thinner atmospheres like that. I do want to stress, this is obviously referring to the ISC that aired, I think it was a week ago now. We are at the beginning of developing this pipeline right now. Right now it is characters, but part of what's going to happen over the next several months and maybe even longer is that characters will get together with tech animation, we'll get together with the actor status team, we'll get together with all these other groups and figure out how to make them, because we do not have a pipeline for making creatures. We haven't made creatures yet. So we have to figure out what this new pipeline is and what we can take from the other pipelines that we've built and what needs to be created bespoke. Just on this, who makes the sounds? Does the sound of a creature fall under dialogue? Is that going to be Bob going out there and recording different animals to combine it? Or is it going to be the realm of a tech designer who's got to go out there and simulate something from scratch? Those are the kind of things that we still need to figure out as we build that pipeline up. Me, personally, I'm hoping that we send Bob into as many dangerous areas as possible with a microphone.
I would like to say, though, it does cover very similar ground when we consider behavior and how, as a dialogue team, we do chime back and work with design and narrative on the behavior templates and things like that. So I would like to think we would have at least some collaboration there to figure out what they would do, how they would go about their day, attacking, hunting, or just milling about. So those things really, the behavior and the sounds, those really go hand in hand. I would like to see that this becomes a collaboration just like it has been with dialogue.