Category: Audio&Games

Right now, we have some of the best tools ever made to build game audio and computer games.

The duopoly FMOD and Wwise as well as all the custom audio engines and older ones allow us audio designers around the world to integrate audio with input, game mechanics, animation, interactivity and so forth.

We have great tools. The question is: in the experience of playing the game, how much control audio has? How much audio is kind of central to a core mechanic, to an experience?

The answer is: we need game engines to listen to players and audio! How many games are listening? Why NPCs in FPS are so impossibly deaf? Someone screaming like a pig cannot not be heard by someone a few stairs away. Why? We’ve all watched and listen to the making of of Inside’s game audio. The biggest takeaway being that the game runs on top of the audio layer. That is, audio happens and the game waits for it or acts accordingly. Most games don’t. Most games will stream some music or soundscape and cut it like someone unplugged the speakers, just to load the next level. In 2018 with the amount of storage, memory speed and all those CPU threads, we have very, very few technical excuses. It’s all about decisions.

Those are decisions that need to be made at the game design and game engine level. It’s not about audio technology, generated or authored content. It’s about deciding that audio should and would be treated as an underlying layer orchestrating the rest. It is extremely efficient at enhancing a game and polishing it.

Nintendo has been doing that for so long with enormous success. Many 80s and 90s games have “smart” audio. Martin Stig Andersen had a full session at GDC in 2016 on how Inside is a game that listens. It’s a bit embarrassing that we’re not making this a common practice across our industry, a standard for game audio.

Making games listen is crucial to our craft. To our polish. In a world of very expensive game development, audio could… *puts sunglasses on* change the game.

Book by Jesse Schell. Great stuff, I can’t read it without hearing Jesse’s voice. He’s a great orator. I had already gone through quickly. It’s always good to re-read academic books years later. There are points though, that I think are changing quite dramatically.

On demographics

Jesse pins the 25-35 bracket as peak family formation, which is pretty far from what is going on these days. I’d say this is the bracket where people stop playing games because life is stressful as hell or it’s when they play 24/7 because life is stressful as hell.

That’s quite a change. the 35-50 bracket is the peak family formation now. But it is also a bracket that has other properties that it didn’t used to have, like a much higher number of single people or couples with no kids. It extends into the 50+ bracket. Those people want games that last, games with legs. Games you can come back to anytime without feeling left out. Games that are more about mechanics than stories because after over three decades on earth, if you consumed a decent amount of entertainment, you already have experienced most stories. Games that are almost more like adult toys than games.

On males and females

Jesse starts straight up by affirming that males and females are different. Man, do I disagree. The only thing that makes us different is appearance, a bit of extra muscles for men and a bit more fat for women. That’s it. We all love different things. Woman or man, it doesn’t matter. Some women adore competition, some men don’t give a damn. Sometimes it even depends on the time of the day. I might be very competitive at 10am but will just say “nah I’m good” at 930pm. Unless I’m on a dance floor. Shit varies.

On the physical front, women have been closing the  performance gap since they can train as much as men now. Tennis women serve as fast as men these days. This is really new. But it’s that simple. More similar training, closer physical performance.

I think it’s weird to claim “we’re different, duh” on the basis of what society has created, our old habits and traditions. If you take all of that away, humans are quite similar. That is, we’re diverse. Gender doesn’t really matter. I think it alleviates some designer pain: not thinking about women VS men when designing is liberating. But it requires more work: it’s harder to encompass a much bigger, mixed crowd. This is good for the future I think.

On architecture

Jesse writes “the human mind is very weak when it comes to translating 3D spaces into 2D maps.” I guess I’m pretty good at that. I can navigate and translate 3D to 2D and 2D to 3D in my head quite easily. I’m always one of the first in a group of people looking at a map in a mall to understand where to go. I never get lost. I can go somewhere once and remember how to go back years later. I navigate my future house in my head as I’m pleased. It’s cool! But how to monetize this though… I digress.

On audio

“audio can be incredibly powerful”. No, audio *is* powerful. It definitely is. It’s a physiological thing. Your eyes go to sleep, your ears are on 24/7. Ears and being able to listen and survive are deeply connected. Ears are wired in ASM and eyes are like some weird mix of shaders and C#, whatever. That’s why audio feedback is more visceral than visual feedback, and why we should spend a lot more time on audio than textures but anyway. As Jesse is saying, sound brings life to touch interfaces, making them a lot more enjoyable. The problem is battery life: yes, playing a sound on a speak every single time you touch a screen drains a battery like crazy. Nonetheless, audio y’all.

On curiosity

Jesse goes “in a sense, curiosity makes you “own” your learning”. That’s how I feel too. I’m curious as much as I can, wondering about many things. I think curiosity is something that you’re more or less born with but does the environment shapes us. I nurtured curiosity by growing up in the 80s and 90s, when you didn’t have a choice but wait for tiny bits of knowledge to come once a month, through a bunch of magazines.

Kids and teenagers today don’t know what’s like to be curious, they’re constantly overwhelmed. Not their fault, all of our screens are busy. They used to be black with a few white characters. Now new generations rarely know what’s good in owning/groking something, because they don’t even know the feeling. Abundance is a bitch.

The Art of Game Design.

Filfre.net. A history of computer entertainment by Jimmy Maher. Absolutely bloody amazing. Please donate to this man.

This week I read the genesis of the Commodore Amiga. The 68000 Wars, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. This is awesome and so precious.

In France the Amiga was rare as hell. All my friends had computers and consoles from C64 to NES with ROB, none had an Amiga. But magazines were always reviewing games on it, displaying those amazing colors that were inexistent on my IBM, still running in CGA/EGA.

The Amiga was vastly superior and yet, was sort of not existing outside printed pages. Weird! Even weirder was when they closed everything and died early 90s right after announcing new machines, that was so unexpected. On the front page of all magazines that month. Thanks to Jimmy, I understand now why and how Commodore and Jack Tramiel and all those folks were on the verge of bankruptcy the whole time, ready to take insane risks and playing dirty.

Learning that they went to see the guys at Digital Research to adapt their dying OS to a brand new platform that wasn’t running the same hardware, and actually made it work in a few hardcore months, tells you everything about the mentality of the computer game industry. We Brute Force. We Crunch. Since 1974.

The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time.

I first-hand witnessed that as a kid. The IBM PC was not exciting for games in 1988 but was the shit in 1992. Improvements were made every month and you could just swap a card or plug an additional one. Look at graphics: the Amiga was the star with its legendary HAM mode. But then VGA and SVGA happened discretely, games started supporting those modes and that was it. The Personal Computer wasn’t bragging about its technology, it was a consortium of manufacturers who simply were just pushing hardware out, selling more and more.

Anyway. Historic stuff right here.

I wholeheartedly agree with Jesse. Why aren’t those principles applied more systematically in everything we do building those games? I don’t know. I know playing bass daily gives me a very tight sense of rhythm and flow that I can’t really explain or quantify easily. But it is in me and it comes from another field, music. Which is a game. That follows patterns and design principles.

Design is the same everywhere.

Raph Koster at it again. After reading most of the discussions and his awesome blog posts. Two things:

– Our capitalist society destroys the middle inexorably. Mid tier developers, middle class, same. It’s by design: capitalism focuses on maximizing profits which exacerbates both ends of the spectrum. The bottom and top rise while the middle deflates. It’s almost pure physics at this point. I don’t like it, I like the middle, the middle is balanced. We barely mention game developers but we are the ones suffering the most from that strong tension between small teams/budgets or huge teams/budgets. Both bring crunch and unemployment, stress and means to brute force as much as possible (loot boxes are some kind of brute force financing). Capitalism needs to chill. We need to chill.

– Generations, as always: a lot of gamers are over 35 and hate those loot boxes and pay for win systems. Younger generations? They love that stuff. They don’t mind subscribing, they care about showing off their new avatar’s outfits. It’s a generational gap. They have less than ever offline and want everything online, that makes sense. Millennials and internet natives are a much bigger, juicer crowd than gen X. As the industry focuses mainly on youth well, they mostly try to tell 35+ to fuck off. But not too much because they still bring a lot of money too. They can’t afford to lose that crowd either.

That’s where I think something will happen in the next five to ten years: population is aging, living for a much longer time. Most of the wealth is going to move to older brackets. Publishers will have to go and reach out for this money and they might have to rethink their business models and subscriptions to include 40 and 50+ people.

Green line: Wolfenstein II, a big single-player game that just came out.

Blue line: Stardew Valley, a small single-player game that came out last year.

Orange line: Euro Truck Simulator 2, a medium single-player game that came out years ago.

Wolfenstein, which probably cost more than Euro Truck and Stardew combined times two or three and which just came out –that is, when peak interest is at its highest- is already engaging players less than games that came out many months ago.

It’s a rough business. But there are opportunities.

There is a wide, very wide spectrum of games that people like to play. Stardew Valley is a one-man made farming simulator averaging almost 10K players at any time, that’s tremendous.

Imagine a band touring and having 30,000 people every night to see them. That’s Euro Truck Simulator 2 and you’ve never heard of that game. We really can’t say people don’t play or are a fleeting crowd that buys games for cheap and never play them. People like to play games, no doubt!

We just under or overestimate a whole lot of things.

On Super Mario Odyssey shaped by a designer trusted by his bosses, no matter what.

He also bluntly stated at a roundtable press conference in Japan, "We should have designed the game differently, but we couldn’t." To Miyamoto’s credit, his confidence in Koizumi’s potential as a designer never wavered.

Koizumi became producer of Super Mario Odyssey after directing Sunshine, Galaxy, Galaxy 2 and 3D World. It’s interesting to see the trust: a game designer missing the mark on a huge IP like Mario would get fired or be sent to a closet inside the company in the West. At Nintendo they encouraged him and let him work on what would become Super Mario Galaxy.

I think the Galaxy games are the finest Mario games, if not finest platform games ever made. It’s joy all along. I would love a version that goes forever, cutscene-free. I would just send Mario to rest like we do in MMOs.

TL;DR: legendary game developer trusts newbie to take over one of the biggest IP in the world, newbie kind of fails, developer keeps trusting him, newbie directs and produces the best platform games ever made.

I like that.

Specifically, the team behind Overwatch wanted to address a criticism they have received from users over the last few months: It can be challenging to follow what’s going on when watching Overwatch eSports. They’ve taken the following steps that will hopefully make things a little better.

Viewing improvements. Let me get this straight: Overwatch players themselves are having a hard time to decipher what is going on between 25 very different heroes that rotate on 4 different roles while using several abilities in blazing fast action.

That’s a huge amount of data to process while watching a game. People watching sports are chilling. They can process data but it needs to be simpler, a lot simpler than 25 very different players doing a billion different things in a very fast-paced fashion. Nobody got time for that, even regular Overwatch players don’t apparently.

Overwatch’s esport watching issue is a game design issue. The game needs to have a mode where things are a lot slower or simpler.

After being all the rage around 2000, the arena shooter is back. But there’s a problem: people watch people play now, and it’s a big deal.

I watched Overwatch’s 16 “heroes” and you have to appreciate Blizzard’s surgery at work, how things are readable in a chaos of green, blue bullets, force shields, particles and so forth. It’s amazing how good they are at manipulating color palette.

It is also super fast. It’s pretty much unwatchable for 90% of people if not more.

I wrote that two years ago and I guess I wasn’t wrong.

Congrats on the  success! Here’s an interview about the game’s sound design, which is fantastic as I said.

Well, now the difficulty thing. Very good arguments back and forth but I think what doesn’t quite work is the dissociation that happens when looking and listening to a cute game that is that hard. The 30s cartoon aesthetic is just way too naïve in a good way and adorable to be serving such a brutal gameplay. I get the contrast idea but man, this game is so punishing. Your brain gets on a timing/width diet and forgets about all the amazing detail and whimsical sounds happening anyway.

I think the unlimited credit “difficulty system” –like in Metal Slug or Castle of Illusion- would have been better.