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Forza Franchise - From Audio Vision Through Scrum Process and Bug Triage
In 2002, Greg Shaw joined Microsoft's Turn 10 Studios as Audio Director and Business Production Process Manager for a new IP (intellectual property) code-named "Forza." Greg already had six years of audio design under his belt as Production Assistant for Opcode Systems, Inc., Sound Designer for Adrenaline Interactive, and Audio/Video Manager and Sound Designer for Crystal Dynamics where he created, designed, and implemented sound for interactive video games.
When Greg began developing what was to become the Forza Motorsport franchise, it was pretty hush hush inside Microsoft Game Studios and people outside of Microsoft did not know anything about it. Inspired by Gran Turismo, a game on the Sony Play Station, Microsoft was still looking for its own voice. Greg not only established the "vision" for the audio for Forza Motorsport, but he also played a key role in establishing the "vision" for Turn 10 Studios-the studio that produced the Forza franchise.
As the audio lead and director, Greg built and maintained innovation in the audio space as well as defined the next generation quality bar for the Forza franchise and the racing game genre. From the beginning, he reverse engineered the sound of cars, evaluated the audio quality of the competition, developed an aesthetic bar, and delivered communication through prototypes.
Greg managed a staff of internal and external contractors and secured the audio resources required for product development. Building a video game is a complicated process of software development, artistic application of a story line or theme, and interactive game play. It generally takes two years to build a video game of this size. With any software programming design, it is difficult to define the end results two years in advance much less stay on schedule and aligned to the original "vision." The technical challenges were huge. Greg's job was to push the team to make a commercially successful product.
Greg managed the audio for the Forza Motorsport franchise through two distinctly different software development processes-the waterfall process and the agile development method known as scrum. The most common process used in software design is the waterfall or cascading, process-meaning completion of one item leads naturally to the next, having been build on the previous item. However, with a two-year completion deadline, a waterfall process could lead to dead ends and regressions that would use up too much time and prevent completion on schedule. Forza Motorsport 1 used the waterfall process. When Forza Motorsport 2 was underway, it was obvious Turn 10 was growing big enough that some official change in process was needed, so the management team and Greg began to experiment with a process management known as scrum.
In a scrum process, different disciplines work in parallel rather than sequentially. The process is an agile way to hit the deadline dates. Through scrum, one aims to build a bunch or modules of a game (like features) with smaller teams focused on just that feature. By the time they got to building Forza 3, they were making the scrum process work even better. They established an initial deadline of three months to build the first 30 minutes of game play. They started with different disciplines working together with a general understanding of where the game was going, what the visual style would look like, what was the planned audio style, and how the audio would be supported by art. In the first three months, they identified the questions that needed to be addressed, the man-hours needed to keep it on track, and the criteria by which they would judge the sound quality.
With the initial vision in place, Greg led the Audio Program Design through a series of milestone buy-offs. Basically, he established deliverable chunks and oversaw contractors who were paid on delivery of completed pieces (chunks) rather than by the time they spent working. Starting with the end goal, they worked backwards and broke the time into delivery points. For the audio, Greg was the person who sets and "buys off" on the deliverables-that could be a car recording, a rough skeleton of a song, or audio features and code for those features. For example, Forza Motorsport 3 had over 400 in-game cars, more than 50 ribbons (a subset of an environment such as a racetrack), several hours of custom created music, several hours of licensed global car sounds such as collisions and tire traction sound, and the list goes on.
Through the entire design and production process, Greg provided the oversight and the "audio vision" to ensure the sound matched the visual and the back-story for the game and advanced the game play for the end user. The game is by no means complete with the basic production of the software and programming. While testing the game, inevitably a lot of "bugs" can surface. Code is never perfect, and therefore, all software development involves bug triage to identify problems and "fix" bugs or remove them if they have significant adverse impact on the game. Working with QA (Quality Assurance), the Forza Management Team (including Greg) established a process to identify the bugs and classify them for priority importance, severity, and urgency. The team then got together and individuals made the case for fixing or not fixing specific bugs. This meeting has different names in different companies and divisions, but according to Greg, they were literally triaging the bugs.
After initial production and release of the game, the work continues by designing downloadable content and add-ons. Over the eight years Greg Shaw has worked for Microsoft on the Forza Motorsport franchise, they have released three versions. In October 2009, Forza Motorsport 3 was released and nominated for Best Audio by GameSpot. Forza Motorsport 3 is widely accepted as the best sounding racing game delivered to date. The casual game player might be surprised to learn the enormous work that precedes a computer video game release. For Greg Shaw, working as the audio designer on games offers enormous technical challenges and many rewards. Behind every game, there is much more than meets the eye-and ear.
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