Perfectly said. So if I am building something it pretty much has to have sound. Sometimes I see the audio designer like a costume designer in games. We dress games sonically and it gives them everything they don’t have without sound: a life, a vibe (any game without audio feels desperately flat) and of course excitement. As costume designers, nobody gives a damn about our work.
This is why it makes me cringe when I see developers using SFXR for every-thing, even when it doesn’t match the game at all. I mean at this point with seasoned developers it’s just offensive: respect audio, behind the go big with sound because it’s part of making a game polished there’s the need to understand sound and be able to set up audio placeholders as much as with visuals. Learn how to communicate about sound, get some serious understanding of audio. Learn to determine your game audio intention, not the technical 3D part, don’t worry about that. You need to have a sonic idea of your game as much as you have a visual one.
If programming takes so much resource that we deliberately cut the audio out of the equation very early on, it means that programming needs to get simpler or better so that it doesn’t happen. We made a lot of progress but it’s still a massive problem with prototyping.