This feature takes a brief
look at how to tie audio production dates into the overall delivery schedule of
a large-scale video game --
including the key dependencies you should
be fully aware
of.
During production, it is
often the case for each component of game audio to be either dependent on some
other area of work to be completed, or some other area of the game is dependent
on audio finishing a particular piece of work. Understanding
how all these pieces are inter dependant is the key to not only locking-in and
delivering on-time, but also to staying agile and having a production schedule
that is simple to read and aides communication across groups.
The working practice behind
scheduling for video game production is an increasingly complicated one and
boils down to an approach that embraces locking-in tightly and firmly
committing, yet being ready and prepared for changes at any time.
At
the same time, you must
also fully understand that any changes will have implications elsewhere in the
production.
Simple
Task Definitions
I certainly don't wish to get
into different development styles here, such as scrum, which have their own
implications on task types, but I do want the "audio
schedule",
to be simple and clear to understand.
In order to do this I am defining
two simple kinds of task: long-term, and short-term.
Long-term
tasks can be thought of as either time-boxed "rapid
iteration"
and experimentation, or equally much longer sound implementation and
development duties which do not have fully defined
end-goals, but which allow time for constant iteration and direction changes,
usually following in the wake of design and art feature-development and
implementation.
These tasks may never be really finally completed until the end
of post-production, at least from a "final
sound"
point of view.
Short-term tasks, on the other
hand, are considered to be tasks with definite start and end dates and much
more specific, defined outcomes, usually with heavier dependency. This would
include audio feature code work, dialogue recording sessions, sound effects
recording sessions, and
so on.
A detailed and bespoke audio production schedule will only be arrived at
by going through a rigorous pre-production process in which all the key
components and needs of the project, such as music, dialogue quality and all
other requirements are broken down broadly into these two kinds of tasks.
No matter how "agile"
or "iterative"
your development process is in the pre-production phases, production schedules,
and the discipline of sticking to them (or at least being able to demonstrate
what happens to the estimated ship-date when a date is moved out or a feature
is redesigned), are absolutely necessary in game development for a number of
reasons.
Firstly, they allow you to "book"
often expensive outsource services and talent for a specific period of time,
and to plan dollar costs. This is a similarly important element of being able
to stay agile with the dollar budget for the audio on a game, as spending may
adjust depending on when the item is billed.
Secondly, establishing solid
dates also makes apparent a very important chain of dependencies for other
areas of production, for example cut-scene production in which animation or
motion capture may be unable to begin work until the voice recordings have been
completed, edited and handed over as .wav files to the cinematics department.
Finally, the schedule becomes
an essential communication tool between departments and allows its users to
highlight changes to both in-house resources and external contract workers who
may be scheduled outside of the game team, should anything significantly shift,
such as ship date.
Working
Backwards From Ship
One of the most effective
ways of filling out
a schedule is to approach it from the ship date. Working backwards from the
ship date is often the easiest way to work through the dependencies on a
schedule. Each major milestone is usually established by the development
director, or project manager, and once this basic ladder of milestones has been
established, those responsible for planning audio can begin to fill in the
detail of when the audio deliverables and various kinds of work need to
happen.
This, of course,
does not happen in isolation, but through working closely with the scheduling
being donw in all other departments, and looking at the game schedule as a
whole.
Below is what could be
described as a common development production schedule for a triple-A
console title, in which each time-dependant discipline, tech, art, design,
cinematics, etc is broken down on separate time-lines.
You will see that I have
broken down each task, in both the general production schedule, and the audio
schedule, into the two different types of task described earlier, short and
long term, as this allows much higher level visualization of the schedule and
tasks for developers with different scheduling approaches.

Figure
1: An example production schedule (top) and accompanying audio production
schedule (bottom) depicting a hybrid-task view (short & long-term tasks) of
audio asset production and implementation tasks. [Click for large version]