Audio Design Year in Review : My 2022 and Next Steps

As this year comes to a close I want to reflect and take the best foot forward into making next year better for my audio design development. So let’s not waste any time and just get into it.

Overall Impression of this Year

I think this year could have been a lot better for my audio design development and career. For one I took a super long break of about 7 months and really didn't make a lot of progress on finishing the projects I wanted to as developing my skills. I think this is due to me not being consistent and dedicating time to this. In addition I definitely psyched myself out mentally feeling like I wasn’t capable of doing this anymore. However I now feel like the only way I wouldn’t be capable is if I give up. I know my skills may develop slowly (and at times even slower than I expect) but I need to keep chipping away at it to actually make this into a career.

Projects I worked on

How Would You Like to Pay

I did do my first official commission I would say with how would you like to pay. It was also actually my first film job.

How Would You Like to Pay is a short film about a person who gets a call from a debt collector that they owe a some that they must pay rather soon…. or else.

The link to the film is here if you want to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN60KulF85o

I did the score for the short film i.e. the music. This was I found pretty challenging as it had many shifts and turns which the music had to follow. I regret how I approached this and think I should have taken more time to fully achieve the desired. Of course some parts I feel were done well like the intro feels dynamic however again I could have added more fitting sounds and layers to other sections of the film.

The score is found on the link here if you want want to have just a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSNxojgz3jE

Mass Effect

Unfortunately this was the only project I completed this year. I also started a mass effect 2 redesign as set by my mentor. But I was and currently still finding it difficult. I think I will finish the current version but revisit when I am more experienced and with a fresh set of eyes.

There is also a couple of loose ends I tied up such as some soundtracks I worked on last year. There was a game jam game I worked on with a couple of friends called Chaac’s Tomb. This was a game where an archeologist would have to steal treasures and items from an old mayan tomb within a limited time. I had a great time making the sounds and soundtrack for the project as the theme being kind of tribal/mayan inspired means drum heavy tracks with darker winding tones which I love creating. Unfortunately a lot of the sounds didn't end up in the final product due to time.

The soundtracks linked here if you want to listen to the as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJYwaPY8sNo

The year is over to also trying to continue to tie up loose ends there is another soundtrack I worked on for a game with partner for his school about a year to the early part of this year that I’ll be posting. I had a lot of fun on this project because I got to explore a completely new genre and the sounds were very interesting in style. The game is called Augemented and would have been a fighting game with biomechanical fighters (their bodies augmented with robotic mechanism). As a result the sound track and sounds focused on a more electronic sound and the music was requested to be dubstep. I’ve never eperiemented with dubstep music before that and so it was such an exciting experience to learn about making a new genre but also seeing what I could make in those settings. I don’t think I pulled it off exactly but definitely made some really interesting music which I love. The sounds were also amazing.

The Numbers

Of course in the grand scheme of things numbers should never be the be all and end up but I just want to talk about them anyway as just another benchmark.

This year was really good in my opinion for streams. I got 737 streams which is a big jump up from the 200 I got last year. This brings my total streams to 932 (almost at that 1000 yay !). Again to a lot of people this may be small but I think its huge that there are people willing to listen to my music that much. Saying I for most of this year only had 2 projects up (Viking Village and Wasteland Soundtrack) that's great for me.

Majority of these streams came from Vking Village which is a trak I made to go to a FMOD Demo Tutorial of a Viking Village. Of my 737 streams 725 of them were for that one song. So obvisouly this is my heavy hitter. Hoping to get it ot 1000 streams on this song alone and also increase streams for my other projects. I think the best way I can do this is to put out a lot more music and to do that I need to release unreleased music (Which I’ve already been working on) from other projects as well as do more projects where I can make music.

Next Steps and Hopes

Next Year I definitely want to do a lot more. Release a lot more music, Do a lot more redesigns, development my sound design chops more just more.

If you want more specific insight into my goals I’ll be writing a blog on my personal goal setting for my game audio career.

I plan to do this by being a lot more consistent and frequent within my audio design schedule. Atleast an hour every day dedicated to something audio design related.

I’m also taking the steps to learn a lot more and go deeper in enhancing my knowledge. I found this great resource called Game Audio Learning which I’ll link here: https://www.gameaudiolearning.com/. It has amazing resources for not only learning the foundations but connecting with the game audio community. In particular they have a game audio roadmap which covers all the foundations of topics a game audio designer needs to know from sound design basic to implementation to networking. I’ve been going through that and I’ve already learnt a lot. I think in addition to this I’ve been researching most of the plugins I use and diving deeper into understanding how they work and what each part of the plugin does so I can more fully understand how they work and utilize it much better.

I also want to be more creative and experimental and really test the limits of the plugins I have and see what can come of it.

A further way I’ll be feeding towards my goals for the year is to make doing things easier. I’m going over my processes and going to be creating templates as well as organise files better so things can be done and found much quicker.

I also want to start making dedicated content in terms of the background of the sounds and music I’m making post it on my instragram (GabrielleAudio) or Tiktok. I’m very unmotivated when it comes to posting if I’m honest and that's something I want to change.

All in All enjoyed this year but really want to enjoy doing what I love more , making noise. So here’s to a good and productive 2023 and well see how things turn out same time next year.