People Do Not Test With The Audio Turned On

The dirty secret of audio in game development is that the majority of your team will not be working with the game audio on a daily basis. They’ll be watching Only Cans Twitch streams or listening to the latest Cannibal Corpse album. This is understandable, and for many people, it is an essential part of their job, so I would never condemn anyone for doing so. However, this has the unintended consequence that non-audio coders frequently fail to test their changes with audio enabled, resulting in broken code.

Sometimes audio breaks because the audio programmer did something stupid, but it also breaks as a result of other problems introduced into the codebase. In any case, it’s usually obvious enough that it’s the first issue to be logged (provided the QA member is wearing headphones! ), so the bug will be assigned to the audio code team. Another situation where a good audio programmer’s ability to dig around in unfamiliar code comes in handy, allowing them to identify, fix, or reassign the issue appropriately.

This is, of course, a best-case scenario. I’ve certainly found that with large QA teams, not everyone is constantly testing the game with the audio on, and issues can go unnoticed for long periods of time, making the cause more difficult to pinpoint. This brings us to the second essential component of any good audio team: a talented and dedicated audio tester.

Audio testers must be very technically savvy. They should be fully integrated into the audio team, able to communicate with programmers, profile with middleware, and have enough audio knowledge to detect glitchy or peaking audio and imperfect loops. A good audio tester will be able to write up bugs much more precisely than general QA and even use profiling to narrow down issues, saving the rest of the audio team a lot of bug fixing time. They are also able to provide regular sweeps of the game with audio issues in mind, which is something that is frequently missed or forgotten by more general QA testing.

Finally, they provide another excellent set of ears, almost certainly hearing things in the context of the game more than any other member of the audio team and thus providing a wealth of useful creative feedback.