We have been working alongside Northern Softworks for while now to help in the making of their upcoming arcade racing game, ‘Inertial Drift’. Our Audio Artist and Co-Founder David Baxter has been working on the audio design for the game, and was then invited to talk about Dolby Atmos integration with Michael O’Kane at the GDC San Francisco Moscone Centre.

Dolby Atmos is a special surround sound format that upgrades 7.1 to 7.1.4. In addition to having speakers all around you horizontally, you also have 4 speakers mounted on the ceiling pointing downwards, opening up immersive sound capability for speaker playback in cinema and video games. Dolby were interested in this project because not many indie projects plan on using the Atmos platform, and we talked about the key audio elements of the game and how Atmos was worthwhile to even smaller indie teams as well as demonstrating the technical aspects of implementation.

Overall, the whole event was a great experience and it was a great platform to talk about our work and to meet and see some of the amazing talent working with game audio including Nick Wiswell from Forza Horizon 4 and Rob Bridgett from Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Thanks so much to Andy and Lori at Dolby for hosting us and giving us this amazing platform to talk about our work. Atmos is an incredible way to experience audio, and we’re really excited about doing more of this kind of work. Immersive sound is the future and Dolby are making it easier for creators to leverage this technology for their content.