Rachel Simpson is a game designer, composer and trumpet player. She began by showing us a showreel of multiple games.
She’s been working in games for 16 years, she wasn’t a gamer and how she ended up working in it was very unorthodox. She’s been working 10 years in house for companies and 6 years as a freelance artist. She’s had a different time working freelance from the beginning to how she works now. She released 32 games shipped, Singstar, guitar hero, and she’s worked on countless other games.
So she’s worked in all manner of team sizes, tiny indie studios from 4-5 people to massive teams, as well as over one hundred people in a room when working on Guitar Hero 5. She’s worked in multiple genres, but mainly more fun relaxed experiences than dark first-person shooters, she’s worked on word games, driving games, f2p games, and AR.
She’s really interested in UI, and other aspects of it such as how to make a button seem real and have tactile feedback. She’s done composition for music as nowadays smaller studios want someone that can do everything. She’s also done narration recording and casting.
Foley as well is something she really enjoys, finding things that make cool mad noises to use for sound effects. She’s also done a lot of implementation. The interesting thing about implementation is that it’s technical, she’s not been a technical person by nature but she manages to make it work.
She’s a musician and always knew she wanted to do something with music or sound. She studied jazz and then returned back home to Ireland. Did a course in classical music and transferred back to goldsmiths in London. She applied for a job being a singer/keyboardist for Singstar. Transcribing music for the game. She worked her way up after 6 months and became a lead transcriber for the game. She worked for around two years and felt she had to go back and finish her degree.
Kuju/ Zoe mode was the first studio she worked at and was surrounded by like-minded people like herself which made it hard to leave. She worked for a while on creating midi notes on screen for the pitch detection system on Singstar.
She went on to work as a producer and she was in the centre of the team, controlling time management and other things, now she is freelance and working across other projects she learnt a lot of that. But she says she would never do that again and wanted to go back into being an audio designer.
After university, she went back to KUJU/ZOE MODE and was thrown straight into the deep end doing sound effects. She hadn’t actually done sound effects before and found herself learning and asking questions.
Unfortunately, the studio had to downsize which is something that happens in the industry and she found a job in London working on Facebook games on Sims which something she loved to do. She had access to the sims language and would edit the sounds to create sentences. She did feel it was a darker stage f her career as she was working on a free to play game and it was all about exploiting money from users.
She says it was also a more diverse studio, and it did reflect in the game and its design as well. From an audio perspective, it was a live game. She comes from a console stage, where you have a release date and you ship and it’s done. Live games are constantly evolving, and every two weeks they release new content for the players. So they had a week to make audio, and a week to test. So it was high pressure. The studio finally after two years got shut down by EA and her manager thought it would be smart to ask to purchase the music gear as she was sure the equipment would be thrown away. After purchasing the equipment for cheap, she then had the gear to go freelance.
She found herself really enjoying being a freelance sound designer. And learning that being alone means you get the freedom to purchase the sound tools that she needs without waiting for the studio to do it.
She worked on a game called CLAY JAM and another called PEAK. She found herself taking any job she could get because she didn’t have the connections or experience yet to find good work. She moved to Scotland and found a job going on in her city. She ended up working on a free to play mobile game studio. She got the job and went on to become a lead sound designer and lead teams on games.
She didn’t totally love the games at Outplay, she instead enjoyed the stability of working in a studio, and she didn’t have a studio she was working in an office with headphones. She wanted to get back into freelance work and luckily she got contacted by an old friend for an AR game for Lego. Working on lego was interesting for her, she had to learn Repear alongside two other sound designers. She then left and became a freelancer again and found herself being emailed all the time for work. Her advice is that as you get old you get jobs with more connections.
She then eventually went on to do a project with sound installations and after this, she was contacted by a game studio to be a sound designer for a game. For people with autism in VR.
She taught herself FMOD as this is what they’re using, she’s studied VR work and how to use audio in this context. That everything should come from a source or it defeats the immersion.
She gives us a tutorial on her FMOD usage which was beneficial. She also says you need to have inspiration beyond video games, and find your friends. Get noisy and chat with people and find really nice people. As well as online groups that can help you figure out what the problem is.
Post Lecture Reflection
I found Rachel to be really friendly in her presentation and helpful in showing how one can get into the Games industry. This is something I’ve considered due to my love for sound design and sound effects. She also was very giving with explaining the exact way things happened. Her experience of not knowing a lot and learning as she goes does also give me confidence. I find I know enough about audio but perhaps implementation and other aspects scare me a little. It’s confusing but knowing there are ways to learn, like recently teaching myself FMOD it does seem doable. I also found her describing the differences between bigger audio teams and smaller indie teams and being the only audio designer interesting and the dynamics between them. Benefits and negatives of the situation.