Dear gearslutz people,

I am a composer and working sometimes as a sound designer. My question seeking your priceless knowledge concerns a project I have for a Video Game where I have to sound design several sounds for a session in Unity. For that, I would need your precious knowledge to help me optimise my workflow.

As a composer, I had many projects in the past of different nature including short films, animations, or for chamber music musicians, but lately I am mostly specialised into interactive music including VR and Video Games. All that to say that until now, I was using the workflow coming from the more “traditional” media industry (film-video-animation). That is to say, I was asking (or creating myself) the videos for each individual animation of a character or an NPC, putting them in my DAW’s timeline, with markers etc., and sound designing in the usual sense for “traditional” visual media.
In this case, in order to take a video, I create a test scene including all the characters and NPCs, and I am using a test sound (one sample of noise) that gives me the first trigger of interaction or of a idle loop. Then, I record the video, so as to have all the interactions represented visually along with the animations. It is a painstaking process though…

So, after some discussions with the team, we were wondering if there is a more up-to-date workflow for Games, especially in Unity, that can avoid the capturing-video process. For example, (just a hypothesis) if a character does a series of actions, I could possibly use those individual actions represented by smaller events and the programmer can make a script that takes many different files and puts them together (like a sound design on the spot). However, I am not sure if this would be really practical and functional, or if it would create new problems of de-sync and other issues.

I cannot stretch out how important would be any consultation I could get from your past experience and/or any great insights.

Peace!