DGA Members, Meet the Members /

We’re super excited to have our first ‘Meet the Members’ blogpost live! It will be kicked off by Ressa from Gameowdio, who gives us an in depth look into her company and projects. Thank you, Ressa, for being our first member to be featured on our blog!

Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.

Alright, let’s get to it! Ressa, the floor is yours 🙂

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Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your company

Hi! I’m Ressa, the founder and the CEO of Gameowdio, an audio outsourcing studio based in Rotterdam. I moved to the Netherlands as a Kennismigrant in 2019 to work at the game publishing company TinyBuild based in Hilversum. Back then, among my everyday duties, was managing audio for a bunch of projects, designing sounds and creating music for games, and editing audio for trailers and teasers to make them sound catchy.

Before moving to the Netherlands, I worked as a freelance audio designer and composer in Minsk, Belarus. In 2009, I started writing a medieval fantasy soundtrack for Legends of Eisenwald, and then I went on to make audio content for Flash, HTML5, mobile, and PC projects while studying audio engineering at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. Actually, the audio for Legends of Eisenwald was my graduation project at the university.

Gameowdio is about two years old — I started it in June 2021 when I left TinyBuild. That was a tough decision, but I’ve never regretted it. Nothing was keeping me in Hilversum anymore, so I decided to move to Rotterdam, as I really love the city.
Legally, my company is a ZZP/eenmanszaak, which is more than suitable for an outsourcing studio connecting talents with developers. Currently, it’s just me working there full-time, as the legal entity of this type won’t allow hiring anyone. However, I have an outsourcing audio producer, Nataliya, on contract — she’s based in Turkey and is amazingly creative. Nataliya assists me with everything and presents Gameowdio on social networks as much as I do.

You have a great company name! Where does it come from?

Thank you! There’s a funny phrase “homeowner has the word “meow” in it, good luck pronouncing it correctly ever again”. I thought, why not try this pun with “game” and “audio”, so here we are! Sometimes people are having hard time reading this, so I ordered a proper logo design for our business cards:

We would love to see (or hear) some of your work! Please show us some examples of your recent projects.

Besides creating music in any genre or designing sound effects, one of our main competencies is audio direction. That means visioning, managing, and supervising, basically providing full audio support for new projects as well as reviewing and improving audio for existing ones. For every project, we individually form audio outsourcing teams to fulfill the project’s needs. One of Gameowdio’s biggest clients is the Estonian company CM Games, which requested us to create an internal audio team from scratch. As the team was growing out of the R&D department, we made lots of great things like:

To help the company save time and money, the unified audio setup has been implemented into several VR and mobile projects following our advice. Due to that, whole systems like material collisions, movement, HDR mix can be easily copy pasted from one project to another, which makes the development process easier and is a killer feature for prototyping.

Here’s the full presentation of what we do, including case studies.

One of my favorite parts of being a CEO of the outsourcing studio is having an opportunity to rethink what audio outsource actually means. For us, that’s not just telling sound designers and composers what to do, it’s more like buying and selling expertise. Sometimes, it’s far more effective to delegate a task to a musical theorist to help create a generative music system for a game about dreams, an ethnomusicologist to make some historically accurate piece of music or include an outsourcing consultant, PhD in zoology, into the pre-production loop of a game about imaginary prehistoric animals. Using his help, we’ve developed the system for the characters’ movement and vocalizations on a scientific basis.

 

How long have you been a DGA member and what is your main reason for joining? What can DGA do to help your company?

About two months, I think. Never tried to apply for any professional association membership before, as in Belarus it barely made sense, and in the Netherlands I didn’t know that was possible for expats. Then some of my friends from Denmark and Slovakia told me they were members of game developers associations, one of them even created an association for audio developers, so I just got curious and applied to DGA. So proud to be a member!
The most awesome thing so far is the DGA Slack group where I’ve met awesome people willing to share their experience and passion (it might sound too posh but it’s real). It’s been a surprise to see a lot of people actually sharing valuable stuff there. So, networking is the best thing so far.

I’m very much into speaking and organizing audio activities at conferences, so finding speakers or asking the members of their opinion about certain activities might be a point where DGA can be of help!

What ambitions/plans do you have for your company?

I’d love to grow a BV out of it, to create workplaces both for Dutch game audio talents and expats. One of Gameowdio’s strongest sides is mentoring juniors and getting wannabe game audio professionals ready for real projects. It’s challenging for people from Eastern Europe as there barely are any opportunities to get proper education, I mean, in interactive audio. Here in the Netherlands, as I’ve seen so far, game audio graduates already have serious knowledge and practical skills. I believe some of them might create a great core team for the upcoming bigger Gameowdio.

Anything else you would like to share with us?

We are really keen on technical sound design and R&D, and it’s written in Gameowdio’s mission that we’re spreading the word about audio middleware and the whole idea that sound is always a system within the game. That’s why we started the “CATs” (Creative Audio Techniques) initiative for indies. The idea is — we receive a video footage or a game build, create one technical system within Wwise or Fmod (also Unreal Engine 5.1 with MetaSounds planned) with all the assets needed, and post a video about the system and our creative process on Youtube. The developer gets the repository with the project so they can instantly integrate it into their game and then start something new on their own when the middleware is  integrated. We provide all the info about the integration in the Readme file. This initiative is  completely free for the devs, we show off our skills and at the same time spread the word about audio middleware. So it’s beneficial to all sides.

Here’s our latest example of CATs.

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Thank you, Ressa!

Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.

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