In March 2021, Apoorva Bansal and I gave a talk for GDC entitled “Big World, Small Team: Designing a Scalable Ambience System for Ghost of Tsushima.” The talk outlined the journey we took in developing the procedural ambience system we used and I hoped it would serve as a potential blueprint for other studios looking to build a robust, flexible ambient playback system that reduces the manual workload of hand-placing emitters in the world.

The talk was behind a paywall, as many talks are on GDCVault, but I noticed recently it’s now accessible as free content, so I wanted to share it in hopes of more people being able to learn from the successes we had.

GDC 2021 was a weird one because it was a fully remote GDC. We pre-recorded the talk and I was actually down at Playstation in San Mateo mixing the Director’s Cut of Tsushima at that time., while Apoorva was in his apartment. Then during the actual conference, we watched the stream and answered questions in the comments. It was a different time, and I’m so glad we’re back to in-person and hybrid conferences. Here’s the link to watch it on their site. Hope you enjoy!

https://gdcvault.com/play/1027222/Big-World-Small-Team-Designing