Two Roles in the Games Industry

The first role I will be exploring is the Audio Engineer.

Audio Engineer is kind of more of a technical job rather than artistic, they oversee all of the equipment used and they dictate the overall sound of the game, but don't generally have anything to do with the soundtrack, which was surprising to me as I thought that that would be one of their main responsibilities.

When games were still a young medium the Audio Engineer didn't have a very demanding job, aside from the music in a level there wasn't much more needed, usually synthesised sounds were used to imitate real sounds, recordings were very rarely used an it a lot of cases the audio design (besides the music soundtrack) was handled by the programmers and coders.

The next role is the Technical Director.

The Technical Director is quite similar to the Audio Engineer in the sense that they are both uncreative roles in the process and the Technical Director mainly centred around keeping everything running smoothly, again something that surprised me, by the titles I would have thought that it was a job that involved dictating the programming team and having a major role in the dynamics and game-play in a game, but is rather a job that mainly involves  keeping people in the studio and partners of the company connected and in-sync.

As the games industry has grown it has developed from an environment where a few people in a studio would make a game by themselves and it wouldn't be all that expensive and the risk wasn't that high; if a game didn't do well they could try and make another one to make their money back, but as the industry has grown, demands have grown and teams have gotten a lot bigger and the risks have greatly increased, studios can hardly afford a game not doing well on release lest they go bankrupt. As a result of things getting a lot more complicated the need for someone to keep everyone connected and in line has become very important.