Written by Alex Riviere
Mixing is a crucial aspect of game audio development that can dramatically improve the player’s experience. While it is critical to the perceived quality of a game and its engagement, audio mixing, perhaps due to its less tangible or quantifiable nature, is also one of the least understood disciplines in game development. Mixing a game involves balancing volumes, managing the frequency spectrum, adjusting dynamics, attenuating sounds over distance and creating depth in the soundscape, considering acoustics and propagation, defining panning rules, and carefully prioritizing sounds to maintain focus on the most important elements in each moment. Additionally, it involves managing the relationship between music, dialogues, and sound effects. Those responsible for the game mix play an important role.
What’s mixing?
Mixing is the process of balancing various audio elements within a soundscape, including sound effects, Foley, ambiences, music, and dialogues. It involves using a range of tools, such as equalization, volume, ‘automations’, compressors, reverbs, delays, and other effects and prioritization or editing techniques, to achieve clarity and consistency among these sonic components. However, in my opinion, mixing goes beyond achieving clarity. It is fundamentally about making creative choices. It extends beyond simply balancing audio elements and encompasses artistic decisions that enhance gameplay, storytelling, player engagement, and ultimately the emotional impact of the game’s soundscape.
In my opinion, mixing goes beyond achieving clarity. It is fundamentally about making creative choices. It extends beyond simply balancing audio elements and encompasses artistic decisions that enhance gameplay, storytelling, player engagement, and ultimately the emotional impact of the game’s soundscape
The person responsible for the game mix, often a senior member of the audio team such as the audio director, audio lead, or senior sound designer, collaborates closely with experts from other disciplines to determine the sonic focus, moment to moment, in the various scenarios offered by the game. This process involves extensive experimentation, iteration, collaboration, and refinement of the mix over months or even years, depending on the scale and scope of the game, in order to achieve the desired ‘final’ result.
Why is mixing important?
One of the primary goals when mixing linear media such as movies and music is to create a balanced soundscape where each sound element can be heard clearly, without being drowned out by other sounds. Similarly, in the context of a game, the main objective of mixing is often to ensure ‘readability’. This often means enabling players to understand the action taking place in the game, allowing them to make timely decisions or take appropriate actions. Mixing is crucial for the ‘readability’ of gameplay but also of the narrative, encompassing the comprehension of the story and the intelligibility of the dialogues. By achieving a clear and well-defined soundscape, game audio mixers can enhance the player’s experience, enabling them to grasp the action at any given moment and become fully engaged with the game.
It is essential to ask yourself simple questions that could yet lead to complex answers: Why do you mix your game? What are your creative and aesthetic goals beyond readability? How does your mix serve the creative vision, the game design direction, and the narrative direction of the game?
Readability is key because a poorly mixed game can diminish the overall experience and even make the game unplayable. However, the importance of mixing a game or other forms of media extends beyond clarity or readability. A well-mixed game can significantly enhance the player’s emotional engagement. To achieve this level of mixing performance, it is essential to ask yourself simple questions that could yet lead to complex answers: Why do you mix your game? What are your creative and aesthetic goals beyond readability? How does your mix serve the creative vision, the game design direction, and the narrative direction of the game? Once you have defined these goals for your game, making creative choices that enhance emotional engagement should become relatively easier.
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What are the differences and similarities between mixing a game and a movie?
When mixing a game, a classic methodology is to work with pre-mixes, where different audio features are already balanced separately. This is somewhat similar to the concept of ‘pre-dubs’ in film mixing. In the context of a movie, pre-dubs refer to the initial stages of the sound mixing process, where various audio elements are divided into categories and pre-mixed separately to achieve a balanced and coherent sound within specific groups of sounds (e.g., sound effects, Foley, music, dialogues). For example, pre-mixing dialogues involves adjusting levels, frequency spectrum, dynamics, and loudness to ensure consistent and coherent dialogue that maintains desired intelligibility throughout the film. Dialogue is a critical element in movies, and achieving clear and intelligible dialogue is generally a priority. During dialogues pre-dubs, any issues such as background noise, inconsistencies in recordings, or integration of additional dialogue recorded in ADR sessions need to be addressed while maintaining coherence with on-set recordings. Ensuring dialogue coherence and naturalness often requires meticulous editing and processing techniques, and it’s preferable to handle these tasks during pre-dubs rather than the final mixing stage. However, this may not always be possible depending on the production constraints of the project.
This pre-dubs approach allows for more control, flexibility, and optimal utilization of the final mixing time. The purpose of pre-mixing is to create a set of sub-mixes that can be easily manipulated during the final mix, making it more efficient and enabling the re-recording mixer to focus on the overall soundscape while having detailed control over each element. Mixing stages are expensive, so it’s best not to use them to adjust or fix problems that could have been addressed earlier. In movies, pre-dubs are often performed by experienced sound mixers who possess the necessary technical expertise to balance and process different elements effectively. Once the pre-dubs are completed, these sub-mixes are brought together in the final mix stage. The final mix primarily involves combining and making adjustments on the pre-dubs, and making artistic choices for the overall soundscape. However, it’s worth noting that the final mix may still require additional sound design work.
Conceptually, game mixing follows a similar approach. A game is divided into features, allowing for the breakdown of audio elements into manageable groups within the game’s soundscape. This core concept of grouping and pre-mixing related audio elements separately before further manipulation during the ‘final’ mix aligns with the idea of pre-dubs in movie mixing.
It’s important to have a mix ‘owner’, or mix supervisor, within the audio team who can establish rules for panning, loudness, frequency spectrum, dynamics, acoustic sends, attenuations, etc., for each sound type
In other words, every time an audio team member implements a sound or a set of sounds and add dynamic audio systems with variables (e.g., parameters, attenuation over distances, game states), pre-mixing is inherent in the process. Therefore, it’s important to have a mix ‘owner’, or mix supervisor, within the audio team who can establish rules for panning, loudness, frequency spectrum, dynamics, acoustic sends, attenuations, etc., for each sound types (such as for example ‘high-spl sounds’ like explosions or gunshots, ‘ambient dialogues’, ‘ambience beds’, ‘player character Foley’, etc.), and assist with audio feature reviews. Without clear rules and directions defined early in a game project, the mix supervisor would spend more time addressing pre-mix inconsistencies in the soundscape rather than making artistic choices that significantly improve the player experience. As much as possible, the goal should be that the game mix should feel in control and ‘readable’ at any moment during the game development cycle. It’s a highly iterative and collaborative process, particularly when it comes to pre-mixing features, as audio implementation and pre-mixing are ongoing throughout different stages of development. As new assets are added, gameplay mechanics could still change, or adjustments could be made to visuals (i.e.; animations, VFX, UI art, etc.), the audio design and pre-mixes need to be revised and refined accordingly. It’s also the responsibility of the mix supervisor to ensure that the game’s mix meets technical specifications, conforms to industry standards across different gaming platforms, and translates well across various playback systems (e.g., headphones, hi-fi systems, surround 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos home cinemas, TV speakers, etc.). This includes monitoring the mix on various setups in a calibrated listening environment, and mastering the game to ensure optimal sound quality and compatibility for different audio endpoints.
Mixing a game and a movie is similar in that both require attention to detail, collaborative and proactive work, creative decision-making, and technical considerations that go beyond the initial balancing achieved in pre-dubs.
When is game mixing being done, and what are the different phases involved?
If you’re constantly pre-mixing on the go and the pre-mixing is always changing, you may wonder when the actual game mixing takes place. Is there dedicated time allocated for a ‘final’ mix? Well, game development cycles can be lengthy. Creating a game and pre-mixing on a feature level can take years, especially when dealing with ambitious AAA games. Game development is an iterative process, and games can have a large scope and be highly systemic, with frequent changes to the game design and art, as it is developed and tested. That’s why game development utilizes ‘gates’ of approval.
If you’re constantly pre-mixing on the go and the pre-mixing is always changing, you may wonder when the actual game mixing takes place. Is there dedicated time allocated for a ‘final’ mix?
These gates are internal or external milestones for the game development team, such as a ‘Vertical Slice’ gate, an ‘Alpha’ gate, a ‘Beta’ gate, and so on. These gates allow the mix supervisor to set aside time before each important milestone to perform a mixing pass on the game. This is often the time when the mixing person can be creative and test artistic choices to evaluate how they feel in the game context. It also helps set new mixing standards along the way for the rest of the audio team, enabling others to work more instinctively with the pre-mixes as the game’s development progresses. Between these milestones, things will likely be in flux again, so the mixing supervisor(s) need to be flexible and able to adapt to changes, often working collaboratively and proactively with other disciplines to ensure that the vision for the game audio mix supports the game’s creative goals and mechanics.
As the game nears completion or the shipping stage, the mixing passes conducted during the final milestones are considered the most important ones, as they are closer to what you might imagine a ‘mixing pass’ to be in other industries.
The time allocated for each milestone depends on various factors. Firstly, the complexity of the game design and its audio systems can significantly impact the time needed for mixing. Games with dynamic audio systems that respond to player actions, environments, and events require more intricate implementation and mixing work. Integrating interactive music systems, spatial audio (compliant with different endpoints specificities), and highly interactive audio features can further add to the time required for the different milestones’ mixing passes.
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Collaboration is an additional factor to consider. Effective collaboration and communication between the audio team, other game developers, production staff, and other stakeholders are crucial for efficient mixing. Clear communication regarding the audio vision, feedback loops, and any changes or revisions made by others during a mix pass can also greatly impact the time needed for the mixing process. Although it may not seem significant, communication and coordination among team members can be complex, particularly in larger teams where there may be multiple layers of management and decision-making.
The quality of the source audio assets and the pre-mixes of the features are another factors influencing the time required for the mixing passes per milestone. After all, mixing is about taking a step forward towards having a final shippable game, so quality assurance and testing are inherent parts of the mixing process. During the mix, it’s likely that you’ll need to ensure that the different elements of the soundscape behave as intended across various platforms and listening devices. This testing phase, depending on the amount of work invested by the mix supervisor in the pre-mixes, may involve identifying and addressing issues or bugs, which can add additional time to the mix.
Finally, throughout the game mixing process, the mix supervisor and the audio team collaborate closely to address any complex audio challenges that may arise. This could involve adding or optimizing systems, refining mix states, and iterating on the audio contents and their implementation until the desired balance and quality are achieved. The goal is to create a cohesive and impactful audio experience that aligns with the game’s creative vision and supports an engaging player experience.
How do you mix a game?
Games can possess a high level of systemic interactivity, presenting a challenge in effectively mixing every scenario while making creative choices that enhance the overall game experience. To tackle this challenge, the process begins with establishing control through source contents and pre-mixing on the audio features level. Meticulous attention is given to elements such as loudness, frequency spectrum, dynamics, attenuations, panning rules, and bus routing, ensuring a sense of balance within the ‘base’ mix.
Moreover, at the audio emitter and sound voice levels, additional logic can be applied to control the selection of sounds that would play in accordance with different possible scenarios. Besides, real-time sound signals prioritization techniques like side-chaining, ducking, HDR, and state mixing are employed to dynamically adjust the audio based on systemic scenarios.
Once the overall ‘base’ mix feels in control, focus shifts to what we usually refer as the ‘golden path’ – usually being the game’s campaign. These games’ campaigns can span from 10 to 40 hours of gameplay or even longer, introducing unique challenges due to the extended duration of the most ambitious AAA games
Consideration is also given to the diverse range of end-points, encompassing various consoles, platforms, and listening devices, each with its own audio DSP and distinct characteristics. The ultimate goal is to ensure a consistent audio experience across all targeted platforms and devices.
Once the overall ‘base’ mix feels in control, focus shifts to what we usually refer as the ‘golden path’ – usually being the game’s campaign. These games’ campaigns can span from 10 to 40 hours of gameplay or even longer, introducing unique challenges due to the extended duration of the most ambitious AAA games.
When working on the golden path, there is room for more creative choices that deviate from systemic mixing rules. These choices are made strategically to deliver the desired emotional impact to players. However, achieving a perfect mix with strong creative choices for every scenario may not always be feasible. As a result, anticipating how players will engage with the game and adapting the soundscape accordingly becomes a valid approach to create a more impactful audio experience. This notion of ‘predictability’ guides the mixing process. As the individual responsible for the game’s mix, it is crucial to anticipate how most players will engage with the game and curate the mix to enhance their experience. Simultaneously, ensuring clarity and readability for those who may choose to play the game differently can be equally important.
By anticipating the sounds that players are likely to encounter in a given path and play-style situation, the mix can be finely crafted to elevate their immersion and overall enjoyment of the game.
Conclusion
Achieving optimal game audio mixing requires a combination of technical expertise and creative skills. It also necessitates a willingness to experiment and iterate until a satisfying balance is achieved. However, the concept of ‘perfection’ can be highly subjective, as is the notion of a ‘final’ mix. A mix is typically considered final upon the project’s release rather than when the mix owner deems it ‘done’ or ‘perfect’. The role of the mixing supervisor for a game is to objectively assess the quality of the mix, aiming to align it as closely as possible with the somewhat subjective perception of players experiencing the game.
Given this context, mixing a game can be a lengthy and intricate process, but it plays a crucial role in creating engaging soundscapes that captivate players, enhance gameplay, and enrich the narrative.
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About Alex Riviere:
Alex Riviere is an audio director, music director, and mixing supervisor with more than 20 years of experience in audio. Alex has worn multiple hats in his career, including: sound supervisor, music supervisor, sound designer, music designer, voice designer, mixing engineer, music producer, and audio localization project manager. His work can be heard on many well known franchises, from console action-adventure open-world AAA games, to PC massive multi-player games, virtual reality games, as well as mobile titles.
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