Lost Planet

Here we are, just a week away from the launch of Lost Planet. I hope you’ve been reading all the weekly developer interviews I’ve been posting.

This week I got to pick the brain of Mr. Tomoya Kishi, the Sound Director for Lost Planet. And if you’ve been following the interviews, you can probably guess that Director Kenji Oguro was present at this interview as well to share a few thoughts.

Since the interview is pretty long, I’ve split it up into 3 parts.

Brian Please share your name and your role on the Lost Planet development team.

[Tomoya Kishi] My name is Tomoya Kishi and I am the Sound Director for Lost Planet.

I manage all of the sound effects for the game and “direct” all sound effects and BGM creation to make sure they fit within the vision for the Lost Planet world.

This includes managing the scheduling for the sound team members and being in charge of working with our external partner, Soundelux. I was also directly involved with the production of the player’s movement sounds, weapon sound effects, and the mastering of the cutscene audio.

Click to read the rest of Part 1 of the interview.

[More:]

[Kenji Oguro] When it comes to art design, I’m able to give my input or suggestions. But when it came to the sound design for Lost Planet, I basically left everything up to Kishi-san.

[Brian] How big is your sound design team?

[Kishi] We had six people in all, two of whom were core team members. The rest of the work we outsourced to Soundelux.

[Brian] How did you end up as the Sound Director for Lost Planet?

[Kishi] Before I joined Capcom, I was actually studying marketing in college, and I’m still very interested in marketing. But I had always enjoyed making music as a hobby, and I have DJ’d at clubs before, sometimes playing some of my own music. I’ve even performed live with friends. Actually we released a few indie albums. So I’ve always had a love for music.

How I ended up with music and sound as a career was, I was doing this club event back in college, and someone from Capcom was there. Actually now he’s sort of my mentor here at Capcom. At the time, he said he created sound effects for games. He was explaining his job to me, I became really interested in that kind of work. Soon after that I checked out Capcom’s website, and it was good timing, because they had a job posting up. So I put together a demo and applied for the job.

I had been using the computer to make music for a while anyway, and the machines and software I use now to make audio for games is very similar. So it was a pretty easy transition.

After joining Capcom, I worked on the audio for the cutscenes in Onimusha 2 and Onimusha 3.

Working on Onimusha 3, I had the chance to learn about some brand new sound technology. At the time I didn’t know that much about the technical side of audio, just making music and recording sound, etc. But for Onimusha 3 I had the opportunity to work with Dolby Labs, and I really learned a lot from the experience. After Onimusha 3 was released, I even had the chance to do a presentation about the sound production process at a Dolby Labs conference.

So working on Onimusha 3 was the biggest thing in my career that got me where I am today.

After Onimusha 3, I worked on mixing the sound for the cutscenes in Shadow of Rome. Once that project was over, the Lost Planet project came up.

[Brian] What kinds of games do you like to play? Do you have much free time to play games?

[Kishi] I’m really into portable games for my DS and PSP. But since I started working on Lost Planet, I’ve been really busy and unfortunately haven’t had time to really sit down and enjoy any games.

[Brian] What other games have music or sound effects that you have really liked?

[Kishi] In particular I though Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 3, and Electronic Arts’ 007 series and “Lord of the Rings” have had really good audio.

For music, I think how Rockstar did Grand Theft Auto’s music soundtrack was really great.

Games and movies have a lot in common when it comes to sound design and production, so movies are a good reference for me. This is especially true for the big Hollywood action flicks, which usually have great sound effects.

I also get a lot of inspiration from music. I listen to a lot of different music, but mainly older stuff. I am into stuff like movie soundtracks from the 60s and 70s, jazz, soul.

I don’t listen to new music that much. I guess I prefer to listen to the originals that inspired what’s coming out today.

Jump to:
Part 2
Part 3

—Brian