GOALS

GOALS is a competitive football game from Goals AB in Stockholm, now live as free-to-play live-ops on Steam, Epic, PlayStation and Xbox. I joined in February 2026 as the audio programmer, three months from launch and in the middle of crunch, with a specific brief: get the audio ready for what comes after shipping.

A live game keeps releasing content every week for years. That asks something different of audio than getting a game out of the door does. The sound team has to be able to add, tune and route new audio continuously and on their own, without an engineer in the loop for every new sound. Building that layer was the job, and it had to land before launch.

Over twelve weeks every sound in the game got a single identity and a single path to travel. Sound designers trigger audio by choosing a tag, and the values a sound reacts to, ball speed, surface, collision angle, who is standing nearby, are published once and picked up by anything that asks for them. Adding a new sound, or making an existing one respond to something new, stopped being an engineering task. One asset now behaves correctly in every level with no duplicates to maintain.

Sound designers can hear a footstep or a kick while scrubbing an animation, tune ball audio against the actual level as a player will hear it, and preview haptics, all without launching the game. Three loops that previously meant a full round-trip through a running build now take a button press.

Haptics was an open brief with no existing design beyond a single screen, and it had to be ready for launch. I shipped it as a system rather than a fixed set of effects: designers author and tune the haptics themselves, and gameplay events route to them automatically, so nothing in the game code needs to know haptics exist. New haptic moments are a content change, which is what a live game needs them to be.