Monthly Archives: August 2007

Organizing your project
Putting together a sound library for a large game project is complicated, time consuming and (sometimes) very frustrating. To try to combat this, I have developed my own little system that seems to work for me and keep things relatively organized, so I thought I’d share it with all of you in hopes that you don’t have to endure the frustration that I sometimes go through. Perhaps, however, you are working on your first game so you’re not really sure what needs to be organized? Or perhaps you are simply thinking — “what’s wrong with CVS?”

The obstacles
There are a few inherent problems that come along with setting up a workspace for all of your sound files:

1) Consistent Naming is important – Obviously, if the game makes a call for dudeJumps.ogg and you have a file instead called dudeJumps2.ogg, its not going to work. Naming iterations for newer versions of files is not practical as it is far too tedious to continue to rename the file write after you copy it into the appropriate directory. I tried this when I first started out. Trust me. You don’t want to!

2) Most files will be in a compressed format – Most game engines (including torque of course) work with a compressed audio format, like ogg or mp3 or even wav using certain compression schemes. In addition, the final footprint of the game may be up in the air till the last minute and re-compression may be necessary for all files. So, even though you may be putting compressed files in the game, you STILL need to a logical place to hold onto your UNCOMPRESSED AIFF or WAV files.

3) Previous version access – And of course, you need to have backups of all the versions you have sent to the developer (if its not yourself) so that at any time when they say “you know what? Last weeks one was better…” you have access to that and can immediately respond.

The solution
The solution to all of these problems involved two pieces: a handy-dandy batch converter and a logical file structure.

For the first-part, I use a converter for the Mac called “Sound Grinder”. Not only is it a wonderful time saver, its also fairly cheap and easy to use. For each of my projects I work on, I create a preset in Sound Grinder and a destination directory. In this way, any new files are dropped in, processed and then put in a directory of my choosing. Options as specific as “make all sounds mono, 128 kbps ogg” can be selected and processed in seconds. It’s also reasonably priced at around $40. I’m sure there are other tools out there that do similar tricks, but this one has worked VERY well for me.

The second step, as I mentioned, is in the logical file structure.

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I will be attending the Austin Game Developer’s Conference from Sept. 5-7 in Austin, TX. I’ll be in attendance at various sessions, the expo and other events, so if you have a game project you want to discuss with me while I’m there in person. Please drop me a line at john (at) seguinsound.com. Hope to see you there!