24/9/24 - First blog, a little about me...

Hey look, it's me!

This is my first blog post of my revived and updated website, I intend to use this site as an archive of my career and a way of looking back on the work I have done, things I have learnt and people I have met.

First a little about me...

I was born in Oldham, Greater Manchester. I studied many things including music throughout my education which led me to choose the Music Production course at Leeds Beckett University. I left home in 2017 for Leeds and lived there until my first year at Jagex where I moved to Cambridge for 12 months to learn the ropes, after deciding Cambridge was too expensive I moved back to Leeds to 'work from home', I make regular trips to Cambridge as I am close with my colleagues and love breaking up the weeks with some in-house dev work. When I'm not working I love to cycle, play darts, pool, go to the gym and generally be around friends, I have found that there is nothing more important in life than a solid group of friends. I live in a leafy suburb of the city and I am currently learning to drive which will help with another passion of mine, field recording. I have a great little portable rig comprised of two wind protected LOM basicUcho's attached to a beaded flexible tripod that can grip around anything.

Now onto my career bits.

I have worked in the video game industry since January 2022 starting out at Epic Win Games as a sound designer on the goverments Kickstarter scheme. Although it was a massive learning and experience opportunity, it didn't actually help towards getting hired at Jagex as they never read my CV. After a 6-month contract I was back on the hunt for my first 'proper' full-time role in the industry. I had a few interviews with various companies, with each one I grew in confidence and my answers became snappier. I eventually got my Jagex interview from nudging Ashton on Discord about my application to them, he must have put my name to the top of the pile. I'd previously gotten feedback from Ashton on my portfolio about a year prior, after speaking to him post-hire, he told me he looks for Juniors who are trying for some time to land a role, the time taken he calls the 'incubation' period. This period seperates the people who think it's a nice idea to work in game audio and those with an actual passion and a drive to land a role, like myself.

After an initial friendly chat with Grace and Ashton, the two lead audio designers at Jagex, I received a trade test. I was in Canada at the time visiting my brother who lives in Toronto. Luckily he is also in the field of audio so I used his monitors, various free samples and Reaper's stock plug-ins to create an enticing test. Having no samples or 'go-to' plugins gave me a challenge and I really had to use my ears a lot more actively than usual, which I think played in my favour massively. Grace and Ashton loved my attention to the ambiences that surrounded the main visuals, they loved my 'out of the view' thinking when it came to additional ambient design, especially my distant dockyard sounds in one of the clips, a distant bell sound came up as a strong kudos point.

After nearly 2 years at Jagex I have decided to start this blog and add to my website in order to form a sort of 'professional archive'. So much goes on in the day-to-day I often forget to stop, pause and look at everything I have learned. This blog will be a way of arching and remembering to stop every once in a while.

I will look at writing about games I have played, sound design techniques, DAW layouts/workflows, field recording, coding, implementation, life milestones, employment, game dev news and more.

Thanks for reading,

Oliver.