Hi there Johan. Name’s Cody, I’m a sound designer here at ANET. I’m glad you’ve got the big dream to work at a sound designer, and that’s exactly what started me on the path to audio department and working here for Guild Wars 2.
How is it to work here? Well, it’s wonderful to have the creative freedom to do my best to enhance the game through sound design and implementation. Speaking for myself, on an ordinary day I’m either designing and integrating new content for the game, planning for the future, enhancing existing game content or working closely with my team and with our awesome audio QA (Keenan) on how best to achieve our design goals.
Unfortunately, I’m still rather new to the team, and thus I’ve never been in a position to hire or make any decisions in the hiring process, so I’d have to leave it to someone else on the team to chime in on what they’re looking for when they’ve expanded our team.
Personally, when I was in school for audio, I was interested in rounding out my base knowledge of digital audio: signal flow, sound reinforcement, recording techniques, acoustics, analogue to digital conversion, working in a DAW, DSP and side-chaining, mixing, editing audio tracks, mastering. It’s been invaluable to me having an understanding of these things as a foundation.
The part I couldn’t learn in school was the problem of taking audio assets and getting them into the game. Doing so has got to be different everywhere you look, so not only can I not get into it, but it might not do you any good anyway.
What got me working here as a sound designer wasn’t necessarily my background alone—I actually started out as quality assurance here. Being familiar with testing, and getting in there and digging up and filing solid audio bugs was what finally led me where I am. So if nothing else opens up for you, that might yet be a viable option for you to realize your big dream!
Thanks for writing in and showing your interest, Johan!