GCAP 2021

Zander spoke at Games Connect Asia Pacific conference in 2021, presenting some practical tips for communicating with people who work in different disciplines. Bridging that divide between vastly different fields is a regular requirement of working with clients who are not audio experts, and this talk contains some advice on how to accurately and respectfully give and receive creative direction in this environment.

High Score 2021

At APRA-AMCOS’s 2021 game audio conference High Score, Zander was invited to present Tech Masterclass: Creating Ambience — which covered his approaches to both creating and implementing environmental and ambient sounds in games. He discussed his design philosophy behind environmental sound, as well as specific techniques for achieving reverbs, and technical methods for optimising for CPU performance — focussing on the overlap between environment and player experience, which includes a surprising amount.

GCAP 2020

At Games Connect Asia Pacific 2020, Zander presented a post-mortem exploring how the music and sound design of Windbound was created. This talk was the highest-rated session of the whole conference, going in-depth into the game’s Foley, creature sounds, composing, interactive music systems, dynamic birdsong, and loads more!

GCAP 2019

At Games Connect Asia Pacific conference in 2019, Zander gave a talk on approaching sound design in a way that improves accessibility for players with low or no vision, called Sonar Solutions for Accessible Gaming. This talk focuses on how to approach sound design as a method of both reinforcing visual information and feedback in a game, and how planning with this in mind from the outset can make a game more enjoyable for players with low or no vision.

GCAP 2018

At the Games Connect Asia Pacific conference in 2018, Zander co-presented a talk with Jeff van Dyck: Boom Box – Audio Workflows Inspired by Constraints. They each spoke about various tips and tricks they have figured out in their respective careers, from pre-production and organisation workflows through to mixing and implementation.

GCAP Loading 2017

Leading up to Games Connect Asia Pacific, the organisers run a one-day symposium for students and aspiring game developers called GCAP Loading, at which Zander was invited to speak. He gave a talk entitled Why Does My Game Sound Like Balls? which covers a lot of common audio problems that he has helped various indie developers overcome in the past. Atticus McNaughton supplied the drawings of cute bunnies that help illustrate the talk's points.

Heart Beat 2018

At the inaugural Heart Beat Symposium at Byron Bay, Zander was invited to give a talk about the sound of sex in video games, entitled Intimate Performances – Approaching the Sound Design of Sex & Romance. The presentation looked at how sex and romance sounds in different genres, and how to leverage generic expectations to help elicit the desired emotional response.

Pax Australia 2016

For PAX Aus 2016, Zander organised a panel with Australian game audio professionals Meghann O'Neill, Rick Salter, and Maize Wallin called Hey, Listen! – How and Why Great Games Sound So Good. The panel was moderated by Lee May of Defiant Development.

Frustrated at the lack of in-depth documentation on the effects of Unity’s audio import settings on performance, Zander wrote a comprehensive guide to optimising these settings for different types of audio in various circumstances. Gamasutra featured the blog post, which you can read here.

For Italian journal of game studies GAME, Zander wrote a paper entitled Killing-off the Cross-fade on his research into "imbricate audio" – a method of creating and implementing interactive music in video games. The proposed method has been used in a few launched titles so far, including Sling Kong and Oopstacles, and is the basis of a procedural music system for a new, unannounced project.

In short, imbricate audio can perform some musical transitions with recorded (or pre-rendered) music clips that could previously only be achieved with sequenced audio data such as MIDI or Mod/Tracker. You can read the paper in full, here.