Lecture at DigiPen on Audio & Narrative Team Collaboration

Today, sound designer Justin Jacox and I gave a talk on audio and narrative team collaboration to game design students at DigiPen Institute of Technology. We have worked together on several student game projects, so we wanted to share our views on effective and ineffective narrative and audio design and why it's valuable for the two teams to work closely together throughout the game development process. We began working on the presentation this past summer with the goal of sharing insights about our respective disciplines and emphasizing the utility of learning about skills and topics outside of one's degree program. While Justin provided audio samples of memorable game soundtracks, I discussed the benefits of being willing to tackle difficult subjects when developing narrative.

Next semester, we will give a follow-up presentation that will consist of post-mortems of the games on which we have worked together as well as tips and tricks for avoiding our mistakes and working towards our successes.