Ok it is as simple as this:

Choices:

1)Custom or library
2)Complex or Simple
3)hours available

These threee factors will determine how long you will need and how lon you CAN work. It really depends on the first two.

Quote: Original post by Emn1ty
Ok it is as simple as this:

Choices:

1)Custom or library
2)Complex or Simple
3)hours available

These threee factors will determine how long you will need and how lon you CAN work. It really depends on the first two.

Surely it's going to be a mix of both custom and library sounds, aswell as complex and simple? The hours availible is part of what I'm trying to find out, really. I need to know how long (worst case) it will take someone to create the sounds for the game. ONLY sound effects, no music, speech, etc.

I'm trying to avoid having to document all the sounds I'll need, because I know for a fact that I will miss a large proportion of them. But it looks from the replies I'm having here, I might have to do that. I don't really understand why no-one can give me a worst-case time for creating sounds with the information I've given.

You need to have a conversation with someone so they can gauge the amount of work required; the information you've given here isn't enough to go on.

You can cover your worst case scenario with an estimate of a year.

Quote: Original post by Boruki
I don't really understand why no-one can give me a worst-case time for creating sounds with the information I've given.

because the information hasn't been detailed enough. You don't have to worry about NDA's as it's more of a techical thing... for example:

The kinds of sounds we're looking at are:
ambient noises (not ambient music)
so i guess you're including ambient stream-type sounds (long atmosphere soundscapes) and ambient one-shot/looping sounds (such as crickets in bushes, beeping computers, stuff coming from objects in the game world etc..). As you can imagine that is completely down to the complexity of the game, how much stuff makes a sound, how much stuff do you WANT to make a sound. How many levels? How large is the variation between levels/areas? etc, etc...

combat noises (impact, squeals/screams perhaps)
again, depends on how complex you want it to be. You could just have sounds that give user feedback (you've press the 'fire' button, play a fire sound) or go very overboard and implement sounds for even the slightest movement of every character tied to it's animations. This is such a big area, which is why i recomended getting a sound person to see it (or some full docs). How many characters? How much variation do you want within the characters? Squeals and screams should be included in the dialog/speech budget, they aren't really sound effects and that's a whole other can of worms...

magic noises (the odd sounds that generally occompany magic)
shouldn't take too long depending on how many sounds are required... but this sort of stuff is usually pretty simple to create and implement...

GUI sounds (most GUIs nowadays have their own sounds)
very quick/easy to do from a sound POV.

general sounds (level up tune and similar)
depends on the nature of what else is required...


I understand it's probably quite difficult to know what information to give out... especially if you aren't a sound person. But i think the most important thing on a forum like this is to give a vague estimation as to the 'scale' of the game, in both real world 'development' terms and 'game world' terms, is it a big long term project with a fully emersive virtual enviroment or a top down arcade shooter which is more of a 'demo'... that sort of thing.

As for the whole original or library sounds thing... from your point of view you don't really have to care where the sounds came from as long as they do your game justice. I'm very much an 'original sound' guy, as i imagine most people on here are, but that's not the point, you just want it to sound good. Having said that, you don't want to worry about copyright issues with soundeffects and also you don't want to have a game filled with instantly recognisable sounds that have been used all over town... yet another can of worms...

If you are talking about 2,500 characters though it's sounding like it's on a pretty big scale. I'd suggest having a crew of a few sound people, possibly separating them for different sound design 'areas', such as Foley, dialog, sound design, etc... that way each person would know everything about their specific area and you'd have continuity within that plus you'd know who to contact if you needed a certain sound.

Money wise, the audio budget is usually around the 5% mark... although it's going up, especially for next gen. But i'm talking about published games on PS2 and the like here, i don't know what the deal is for PC games in the gamedev.net community.

Hope that's helped in some way :)

Cheers

Ok, thats the kind of reply I've been waiting for. It's been very helpful, and actually follows what has been said already (which most peoples replies don't..).

I'm glad that someone finally realised that I was asking from a business point of view, as someone with no background with sounds, and I think that's helped you give me a large amount of the information that I needed.

I doubt we'll come near to 5% of our overall budget for sounds, especially at 2 or 3 guys over a year (and we're planning to allow two years for full development). However, I guess I can budget 3 or 4 guys for a year.

Many thanks!