Inside the life of a Canadian game sound designer and composer

What constitutes “good” audio in games?

For some, that might be the melancholic melodies of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Others, meanwhile, may recall the crunchy cacophony of bullets and explosions in a shooter like Battlefield, or the haunting creaks and monster sounds of Resident Evil.

For Neha Patel, the whole spectrum of acoustics in video games has to be considered. As a composer and sound designer, the Quebec City native has made all kinds of audio contributions to games, from Toronto-based Visai’s award-winning immigrant cooking sim Venba to more fantastical fare like A Sharp’s survival-storybook Six Ages 2.

What makes her game developer journey even more notable, though, is that it includes both formal music training and self-taught sound design. She says it all started when she was eight and first played Final Fantasy VII, enamouring her with the melodies of legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I need to learn how to play this ASAP!” she says, singling out fan-favourite songs like “One Winged Angel” from the VII score. “So I begged my parents for piano lessons, and they said no, because we were poor, and they didn’t know the benefits of music on a child’s brain.”

Two years later, Patel was hit by a car, a frightening incident she says was a blessing in disguise. “When they opened up my cast, the doctor was like, ‘Wow, your fingers are so long! Do you play piano?’ And that was the sign that the kids need piano lessons.”

Eventually, she would study classical music at McGill and, knowing she wanted to do something in game audio, also started producing arrangements and original choir pieces on the side. But her big break came in 2018 when she got a scholarship to attend the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, one of the gaming industry’s biggest networking events.

“It changed my life. I felt like, ‘Wow, this game audio community thing is really cool. People are actually out there to help you out,'” she says. “That is something I had never experienced in my life — a community where I was so, so welcomed. I was just a mere student; I didn’t know anything. But it made me fall in love.”

This encouraged her to start digging more into game audio as she finished her Bachelor’s, which included learning about middleware, different types of composition and virtual instruments, as well as going to local game meetups in Montreal. But of course, that was just the beginning.

The creative process from game to game

You tend to hear about people doing either composition or audio design, making Patel’s work on both especially noteworthy. For her, there’s a synergy between the two, likening it to “cousins” in a family who are in conversation with one another. “Switching between music and sound design, it goes pretty smoothly,” she explains. “It’s more the switching context between projects that I find harder.”

When it comes to composition, she says she draws inspiration from constantly listening to music and references from the studio, whether at home, on the bus or during a workout. “I take not too long, like a couple weeks, just to bathe in it, and then it’s subconscious almost.”

And for sound design, it’s about a similar kind of immersion, just in a different way. “Authenticity is important to me, as much as I can possibly, feasibly do. To inspire myself with that is to bathe in that [world and] culture. YouTube is great, honestly. There’s so many recordings and random stuff that people do that helps a lot.”

Being able to cleanly go between disciplines is essential because she freely admits how “messy” the creative process can be.

“When I start on a new game, sometimes the audio sheet is done, sometimes it’s not, and even if it is, and I’m redoing it to just have a clearer picture. I create a budget, and it’s all approximations,” she explains. “And it’s hard to say, because there are sounds in my sheet that I expected, ‘Oh, this is gonna be a tough one.’ And then somehow I’m literally done in three minutes. And there are other sounds where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna take me half a day,’ and one month later and it’s still not satisfying to the studio or me.”

There’s also an often-unexpected level of thought and granularity that goes into sound design. “The most obvious sounds or the most realistic sounds are not the most satisfying ones,” she says. “If you take literally the sound of, I don’t know, a leaf turning over, it’s not cool in a game. You’ve got to add a little bit of padding.”

In her case, one of the best examples of the required level of attention to detail was in Venba. To capture all of the nuances between the unique sizzles, cracks, and pops of each Tamil dish, Patel actually cooked each dish and recorded sounds along the way.

“Venba was definitely another extreme of going in-depth. It was a lot of work, but it felt in some ways easy to do, because it was all sounds that I knew,” she says.

“So I already had a context of what I wanted it to be. And to be fair, South Indian cuisine, I am less familiar with, so I did have references. I got to watch a lot of videos. I learned a lot on Venba about like Tamil and South Indian cuisine. But the granularity felt natural.”

While Venba saw Patel spearheading the audio design, other projects might have her following someone else’s lead. Early in her career, she had the “really cool” opportunity to come onto Studio Sai’s anime-inspired dating action game Eternights.

“There was already a soundscape at the base — a very strong creative direction, solid references, stuff that was already in game. So I came in very much to assist,” she says. “I wasn’t doing any audio direction on that. It was really just, ‘Okay, here’s a base, follow the directions.'”

Then there are shorter, but no less exciting, gigs that will come her way. A prime example of that was getting to do the SFX for the early access trailer for Mega Crit’s highly-anticipated Slay the Spire 2 after she was approached by prolific game trailer editor Derek Lieu (Among Us, Half-Life Alyx).

“When I saw that text from Derek asking if I was available, I was screaming, jumping, dying… Slay the Spire is such an important game to me, and to have the honour to work on the trailer felt like a full-circle moment,” she says.

While cutting the trailer, Patel says her and Lieu had a close “back in forth” and got really into the weeds about everything, especially the sounds of the beast itself.

“So Derek was like, ‘Oh, it’d be nice if you could have some inspiration from something frog-like.’ So I was watching a whole bunch of YouTube shorts of the cutest and weirdest and grossest frogs, and it was really fun,” she says. “And there were sounds that I didn’t know a frog can make at all. So I love that part of learning and bathing in the sounds.”

She notes that the Slay the Spire 2 gig was unique because it was her first time doing a trailer, and it required working much more quickly. In particular, she and Lieu would fine-tune how “juicy” the sounds should be, all while referring to work-in-progress sketches from Mega Crit. “It’s very, very different from working on games. It’s so fast, there’s so much, especially for a game as juicy as Slay — there’s so much going on.”

Having the flexibility to take on all of these different kinds of projects is critical in the ever-unpredictable world of freelancing. And while some might assume that working on a game as beloved as Venba might have quickly yielded other gigs, Patel says what followed hasn’t exactly been easy.

“I felt like, ‘Okay, I can take a breather. Maybe now I’ll be running around a little less.’ And it was one of the toughest years. I’ve applied to a lot of jobs,” she says. “Navigating it… It’s just this constant need of self-promotion. There are times when things are a little better, and then I’m back to, ‘Hey, I’m available for work!’ Which is about to happen again. I think the key to that is budgeting. There’s gonna be ups and downs.”

Coming full circle

Fortunately, at least, she’s been working on two other projects that are particularly near and dear to her heart.

The first actually brings her back to an early part of her game dev journey. Years ago, when she was still a student, she put together the trailer and main theme for a 2D action-RPG called Spleen from Montreal-based Pamplemousse. It’s a nostalgic tale of a man who escapes his dead-end job by travelling to a magical world in which he gets to be a child again. After those early contributions, Patel is now one of the four developers who are working on the game, which is currently undated.

“It’s like my dream project […] At this studio, I feel like I can give so much to this game, because for one, it’s related so much to my childhood, and a part of all of our childhoods are going to be integrated in the game,” she says. “There’s going to be so much music in this game, in so many styles. Yes, it’s Final Fantasy-ish, but we’re doing chiptune, we’re doing Lo-fi, we’re doing synth stuff, we’re doing piano solos — a lot of piano battle themes.”

She also credits the team for making her a part-time employee, affording her a stability that is “almost unheard of” in the space. “I’m so grateful because, yes, it’s part-time, but I’m still an employee, so there’s this guarantee, there’s safety, and for them to have made that space for me is very special for someone in audio.”

Meanwhile, her other big upcoming project, Speculative Agency’s All Will Rise, has been generating a lot of buzz. Hailing from a global team that includes veterans of the Horizon, Doom and League of Legends series, it’s a role-playing, deck-building thriller about taking a corrupt billionaire to court for poisoning a river.

The studio launched a Kickstarter last month, and at the time of writing, has raised around C$41,000 against its nearly $16,000 goal. As players have been going through the Steam demo, its timely themes of environmentalism and social justice have clearly been resonating. But of course, further funding will help the team reach stretch goals like romantic missions, additional music, and mobile ports.

Patel is the audio designer on All Will Rise, and it lets her return to a South Asian story through the game’s fictionalized version of the ancient Keralite city of Muziris, India. As a result, she’s spent a lot of time watching videos of India’s bustling streets. And while she doesn’t want to give too much away, she also teases the deeper significance behind the audio.

“A lot of words have meaning, and I want to portray that in an almost diegetic way. If there’s trembling, if there’s fear, I want some sort of a brassy, low rumble sound. I want the players to feel what Kuyili [and other characters] are going through. There’s some really cool ambiences,” she says, noting that there’s still a lot of work to be done. “There are things that I’m very much hoping to do to bring an Indian sound, to bring something authentic to the real gist of India, especially that region.”

It’s also not lost on her how she’s been able to help create meaningful South Asian representation through games like Venba and All Will Rise. 

“I’m so freaking happy. I wish I had this in my childhood. I think a lot of mental health insecurities would have been relieved a little bit,” she says. “I think some people don’t understand — never will understand — never seeing someone like you on the screen. Some people will not empathize with that, and that’s okay. You just don’t get it. But it’s truly something special.”

While Patel’s work continues on Spleen and All Will Rise, she’s also seeking out new gigs. It’s the never-ending battle of a freelancer, after all. But in under 10 years, she’s already built up an impressively varied portfolio, and that’s without even getting into her talks at events like GDC, advocacy for sustainability for indie developers, or side compositions.

It feels like her career, not unlike the courageous folks of All Will Rise, is only moving on up. Time will tell what else it will include, but for now, she throws her hat in the ring to join two franchises. “Slay the Spire 3,” she says with a laugh.

“And anything Yoko Taro related,” she adds, referring to the creator of the popular sci-fi action-RPG series Nier. “You can have my number!”

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Image credit: Speculative Agency/Visai Games/Pamplemousse Games