Talk
Connected Thinking: Triggering audio earlier in development
On Elite: Dangerous, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution the audio team at Frontier Developments works across all disciplines and has gathered a detailed insight in both project and player facing development. By leveraging the experience of the in house audio team earlier, more value is added to a project.

Bio
In 2001, Matthew Florianz joined small Dutch startup Khaeon Games as a technical web designer and artist. As the third employee to join Khaeon it gave him a chance to become involved in many aspects of development such as marketing, production, environment art, game design and audio. Matthew's first audio centric role was on the 2005 to 2009 MMORPG; The Chronicles of Spellborn. Although still contributing some level and game design work he truly embraced audio as a specialization. In 2012 he moved to the UK and joined Media Molecule's Tearaway team. In 2013 he joined Sumo to work on the Playstation 4 release of Little Big Planet 3. Since 2014 he's been part of Jim Croft's audio department at Frontier Developments working as part of Joe Hogan's team on the award nominated Elite: Dangerous. He's since lead the audio work on award nominated Planet Coaster and recently Jurassic World: Evolution; Both are open world games that feature user created content a fast and freely controlled camera and ever evolving world complexity. Beyond excellent "real world" audio, such games require systems that are highly scalable as they can portray the world in overview or fine detail alike. Matthew's been intimately involved in the high level creation and fine tuning of technical systems that can scale to fit the capricious nature of these games. In his words: "... sound designers have to step beyond their core creative tasks and think in terms of systems and implementation, while also clearly advocating the role of audio in the greater development process and to the rest of the game team ..." In the words of Jim Croft: "... Matthew's broad experience in game development has helped shape him as an extremely communicative and inclusive leader and he believes that this multidisciplinary experience has helped inform his successful transition from generalist developer to outstanding audio lead ..."