I posted in the Business forum here trying to get a "round" figure to use as a basis for costing man power hours on certain sides of the business that I have no experience with. The quesiton I have left to answer is one to do with sound effects. I'm wondering if anyone could give me a rough, worst-case figure for how long sound effects would take to create. I'm looking for something as simple as 2 a day, or 100 a week. Thanks for any help/links/suggestions in advance!

Depends.

Why don't you give us a brief.

I'm looking for just rough figures. The kind of sound effects I'm talking for are combat sounds, possibly short animal sounds. Nothing beyond 10 or so seconds I would've thought. Theres quite a variety of sounds, as its for an RPG style game.

A quick and dirty job for a small limited demo where all the sounds are based on library sounds could be done in a "few days". A full RPG with lots of different weapons, spells, characters, monsters and locations would take weeks. Longer if you want truly original sounds. Longer if you want revisions and help implementing the sounds.

You can spend a morning or a whole day working on just one sound. Conversely, you can create dozens of sounds in a day if the moon is in just the right place.

How big is your game?

Do you have a looming deadline? ;)

Nope, no deadline.. thats what I'm supposed to be figuring out really. The game is pretty big, we're looking at 2,500 different NPCs if thats any help?

I agree with Kenbar. The amount of time required to create sounds varies dramatically. In general, sounds designers use 4 methods to create sounds:

Pre-made sounds from libraries
Recording sounds in a studio (foley)
Synthesizing sounds
Recording on location

Most final sounds are combinations of multiple sources - that is, the designer might combine a library sound with a foley sound for the final mix. Even when a single source is used, it's usually digitally edited in some way. The amount of work depends on how much of each type is needed and the quality of sound that you're looking for. A high estimate for complex, creative sounds, would be as high as 2 hours per sound effect. I don't think you'd ever see anything higher than that. That's also for harder sounds. Simpler sounds can take far less time (probably half an hour for a good, finished sound).

Do bear in mind that even though you may have a ridiculously large number of things that need sounds, a lot of sounds will be reusable and can be recombined in different ways. and used for multiple creatures (example: many walking sounds will transfer over to different living creatures with slight variations/additions).

You also mentioned that you are looking for a figure in man-hours. It may be worth noting that an experienced sound designer won't work that much quicker than a beginner - the quality will be higher, but it will take just as long. Also, for indie games, most composers do sound design as well, so you might want to factor in that one person can probably fill in both of those roles (and can likely do voice acting, personally and contracting, as well).

Lastly, 10 seconds is VERY long for a sound effect (except for effects that loop). The reason is that if effects are that long and lots of things are happening, you'll end up with a huge number of effects playing simultaneously.

PS If you end up looking for help for either sound or music, drop me a line :).

To give you a rough idea of how long it might take, i spent 5 hours yesterday creating a one second long sound effect for a missile launcher reloading.

Other sounds can be made in seconds, it depends on a lot of things. The length of the sound effect doesnt really have much bearing on how long it would take to make. As the previous poster mentioned, using library sound effects would significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to make whatever you want. Sound designers will have their own personal libraries of recordings as well as purchased libraries and whether or not they have something useful in it would also dictate the amount of time it took. Personaly, i dont use any purchased sound effects libraries, I record all my sound myself or take sounds from my collected personal library.

Give me a a brief outline of what you would need and i can tell you how long it would probably take me. I cant assume to know how long it would take anyone else but from experiance i am relitively more efficient than others.

I've been given permission from the business side of the company to ask for quotes and estimations from outsources. Unfourtunately, sound effects have not been discussed in the slightest until my posts here.

The kinds of sounds we're looking at are:
ambient noises (not ambient music)
creature/NPC noises (combat initiation, sighting, etc)
combat noises (impact, squeals/screams perhaps)
magic noises (the odd sounds that generally occompany magic)
GUI sounds (most GUIs nowadays have their own sounds)
general sounds (level up tune and similar)

As mentioned in a previous post we're looking at around 2,500 different NPCs, but many of these will be similar to the point of sharing their sounds (if only to stop us taking up several gig in sound files..) so there won't be 2,500 different sets of sounds.

Beyond this, my hope (as Creative Director/Project Lead) was to allow the sound guy(s) a bit of leeway for creativity so that they could really put their own ideas into how the sound should work.

If anyone is interested in perhaps putting a quote/estimation for this work together, but needs more specific information (although still below NDA level) please email me at:
chris.freeman@monsterousmasterworksonline.com

I think you'd probably actually need a sound person to look at it to be able to give an estimation that was actually useful. Implementation is also such a big area that you'll have to factor that in, and that will also depend on how you're going to do it. Worst case scenario... as an example i've just finished a game that had myself and three other audio people working full time for a year on it... and it still wasn't enough :( Audio is a large part of the experience and hence will require a large amount of time.

Cheers :)

Quote: Original post by VectorWarrior
I think you'd probably actually need a sound person to look at it to be able to give an estimation that was actually useful. Implementation is also such a big area that you'll have to factor that in, and that will also depend on how you're going to do it. Worst case scenario... as an example i've just finished a game that had myself and three other audio people working full time for a year on it... and it still wasn't enough :( Audio is a large part of the experience and hence will require a large amount of time.

Cheers :)

Is this just for the sound effects or music too?

The reason behind this topic is to get a cost, both monetary and man power, for the sound effects area of the game. We need this cost BEFORE we can complete the business plan. Unfortunately, I'm a creative person not a technical or business one, but I got stuck with finding out stuff like this because it's part of my area.