Wall of sound

So what’s up in the game realm?

The big news is developer 3D Realms closing his doors. Duke Nukem Forever will not be –at least for now- after 12 years of development. I feel it’s fair to see that this big AAA business model was not working and that it’s really not working. Told you.

But at the same time I feel very bad for people working for over a decade for almost nothing. That’s crazy.

Gamasutra posted a really good opinion on game music today. Here’s something interesting:

“Casual games, with their simple, bright graphics, have the design space to use melody and more dynamic themes, as Mario did, and yet by and large they don’t. Try the Ookibloks advanced course video on YouTube as a counter example. The music is distinctive, and perfectly integrated into the casual nature of the gameplay.”

First, apparently Ookibloks will never be out and once again, this is really sad.

But on the subject, Ookibloks was meant to use music frome the beginning, as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview of Work3 developer, Mr Flanagan:

“The audio system, I feel, is a whole new take on quantized audio. The idea of quantizing sound effects is well established, thanks to Tetsuya Mizuguchi, but the technique of also making the sound effects match the key of the background song, and also change dynamically according to key changes is something nobody has done before, as far as I know.

The musical influences come from all over. I could cite "real" bands such as Dee-Lite, Daft Punk, Betty Boo, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and the sound of the Japanese "Shibuya Kei" music scene, but also game music composers such as Nintendo’s Koji Kondo and Cave’s Manabu Namiki. All these external influences get churned up in my head and then reconstituted in my own music. It’s my first time attempting these musical styles — I’m more a techno kind of musician, usually!”

This is one of the proof that Tommy Tallarico is a bit wrong saying there’s plenty of diversity in game music: in the comments everyone is cheering John Williams and orchestral music BEFORE everything else. Ookibloks stood out for Brandon Sheffield so it did for me one year ago because its music was funky fresh, that kind of happy music called J-pop these days. Yeah, like western people only want games to live in a tearful world with sad stories, grey and brown graphics killing people in the quickiest possible way.

Anyway.

99% of casual games don’t pay attention to music because a lot of developers seem to think about casual people as people with no taste.

PopCap do a lot of work around music and audio FXs on their games. No wonder why this polishing is part of their success (addictive music video, 200 000 views before the game was out, music by Laura Shigihara plus the game is fucking crack). 2DBoy did the same with World of Goo with music composed by Kyle Gabler, game designer coder and musician.

Respect music and it will give you back a lot.

On the same note, very interesting post mortem of Rhythm Heaven with Satoru Iwata, Nintendo boss.

“I seem to remember that everyone on the development staff took dance lessons* in order to obtain a shared awareness of rhythm.”

Imagine western developers moving their ass for real on music to make themselves aware of rhythm and poly-rhythm.. Haha. I find the following sentence so interesting:

“He had a strong desire to improve Japanese people’s sense of rhythm through the game. Which reminds me, we use the word "groove-sense" to describe what’s fun about this game. Osawa-san, did you come up with that word?”

Boy do I feel concerned! I play RnB/Funk/Soul a couple of hours everyday and damn, the groove is one of the funniest thing in music (and this is why I stick to that stuff, it’s so much fun to play and I did funky rock à la RHCP). Maybe this is it. Groove == Fun. I’ll develop that later.

You should have seen Eskil’s videos by now. In case you didn’t, do it now.

101,880,503. This is the number of creations in Spore today.