Say the next variant of the Nova is going to be amphibious, and it's pretty much there: it's got treads, it's got a rough mass. Where does your work begin here?

We do work in parallel, hard to say. I'll start working on the... we have a middleware called Wwise, where we have all our sounds. I'll be working on that. At the same time, Dan is going to be working on, well, making the sounds. We'll make a list of exactly the sounds we need: how many loops, loops for this, loops for that, one-shots for this turret cannon. And then when everything's ready, I'll put everything into Wwise and we can try it in game, and hopefully it works.

I think it is worth noting as well, recently we didn't take over, but we were told to do a lot of the work on ships. It came into place around May time. We started doing designs and work from January, but we'd started designing six months earlier than that. We've tried to link with other teams, I think more successfully than we have before. We had meetings last year with the wider audio team, and we found that one of the biggest issues that we faced was visibility with the whole company and how we work, because in a lot of places we're a service team and we're working on content for parts of the game that other people have worked on. Obviously, we're a downstream team, but we wanted to get ahead of the curve in terms of what we're aware of, problems that we can detect early on. Nowadays, I'm much more integrated with the vehicle content team, whether they like that or not. I have a lot of meetings with John and Ben on every ship that's upcoming, vehicle concept meetings. Because of our component system, that really affects how the ship sounds when you're in it. That's localized, so that's in the control of the designer of the ship. But we have the ability to say having those components next to each other is a bit tricky from an audio standpoint. It's going to be annoying for the player. There's not going to be much that we can communicate to the player, because it is just noise when you put too many of them together. So part of the concept process now with ships is I can jump in and say, can that be shifted around a little bit? And that has happened already since May. I got a component moved because of that exact instance. Moving further upstream in terms of representation and presence has really helped us veto any problems that we might come into contact with later down the line, because we would have had to solve that mix issue with one bespoke fix for that ship. Whereas being able to say, oh, can you just move that over there a little bit? That would work much better for the player and for us as a department. That's really helped us be more understood upstream. And also, I don't think it was ever a case of we weren't thought about, but because we weren't present, we couldn't make any noise about what might affect us.