Category: Audio&Games

Austin explains why he wishes Arkham Knight’s Gotham was more populated and analyzes the relationship between superheroes and cities.

Giantbomb is running this article that is perfect to explore the big issue with writing about games.

I know what Austin wants. I love it too, wandering in a virtual place that has a life is sweet. For some. For others, it’s not that interesting and when you make a game you have to compromise really quick. Why? Because really quickly when you have your prototype and your systems running, your characters on screen, assets, you realized that having a “real” city running in the background might be too much if not possible at all.

That’s really the core here. Writers so often think that design stuff is fluid in the build process, it is not. High level design (“make the city alive”) is attached to real things like machine performance, how good your code is, how many people work on this, and how much is already happening. Design is very fragmented at this point, fragile, dependent. And most people have no idea most of the time. Batman Arkham Night is a thick sandwich, there’s a lot going on. Making an open world game gorgeous with almost no loading is some serious achievement. It’s a performance and game writers often just don’t see it this way they think we can just put more stuff in front of the camera, that we just need time. Wrong.

Then, we always have this kind of dumb argument: “but game developer X did it before!” Please, never use that argument that’s the worst. It’s like saying “you can’t run the 100m under 10s? It’s been done before so often!!”. It is a dumb argument.

It takes a lot to make a city feel like it’s alive in a computer game. Taking GTA V as an example of how to do it is oblivious: everyone knows Rockstar is the only company that can/financially afford to do that. Stop being coy! GTA V is five years of development, half a decade with according to Wikipedia over 360 people. Austin goes on with The Witcher 3 doing the city well: four years of development with 230 people in Poland.

Rocksteady is 160 people in the UK. They had four years too but probably way more pressure (it’s the godamn Batman), even just financially (London is far more expensive than Warsaw).

I know, that producer shit is not fun. But when I see people complain –and I’m on Austin’s side, I like wandering in digital cities that feel alive- I’m always annoyed that people don’t realize that it’s not JUST design decisions. It’s not just TOP DOWN, there’s a lot of BOTTOM UP in game development and when an engineer is telling you “we can have an open world but forget about making it alive without HUGE issues” you don’t tell him “but I really want  that” you find ways to mitigate that aspect. Make the player drive that Batmobile a lot for example.

Welcome to game development where you can do anything while you can’t at all.

This week, I’ll be discussing abuse and toxic behaviour in the CS:GO community. Before we get to it, let me reiterate that I am madly in love with Counter-Strike. It’s simply one of the best team games out there. This piece, however, is meant to highlight one important issue that I think we can overcome.

RPS is running that article by Emily Richardson on abuse in CS. I have no idea why people freak out over freedom of speech being taken away or how anonymity allows abuse because there’s no accountability. I’m like what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Oh I know the problem, I have pretty much never played that game outside LANs because of all the racial slurs online. But now I’m a grown up and I still like this game very much. I play with bots and can’t wait for that next LAN that will happen someday.

“The problem stems from the lack of consequence in these games for what would be arrestable real world conduct.”

No, the problem comes down to the fact that we’re talking about teenagers. Maybe early twenties, you know that time when you don’t know shit and you think you’re smart and sleek but you’re still testing boundaries. It’s an age issue to me, by far. When I read this:

No one likes dying, and dying for something that was the responsibility of another player gets to people generally

It gets to you when you’re young and have no patience. When you’ve been married, pay taxes, saw real death hit real friends and that you just want to have a good time strategizing on a Counter Strike map with people who share the same kind of life, none of that gets to you unless you have other issues that are not the game’s problem. Isn’t it obvious?

I don’t care who you are, I just know that if you’re sixteen to almost thirty I mostly don’t want to play with you. It’s fine, you don’t want no grumpy old gamer, I don’t want none of your ignorance and lack of self-control.

Now a lot of games are still played by young people and if games like LoL or DOTA2 have everlasting abuse issues, it’s because early 20s+stardom+insane cash prizes leads to people losing their shit online and getting nasty.

So Two Things To Save CS:GO and multiplayer games:

– There’s a Steam ID and FB connection? Let me filter by age and report age cheaters.

– Let’s log off. Let’s have WAY more LANs. That’s ultimately far better (hearing an opponent shout “fuuuck” across the room is always so satisfying) and if you want to fistfight on the parking lot, there’s that too.

The weird thing about Satoru Iwata is how much he’s praised and how much we have been following none of his advices, as an industry. Almost a decade ago, this is what Satoru was talking about:

We frequently compare ourselves to the motion picture business. We are fascinated with the movies. Hollywood is like an older brother who’s already succeeded; we race to measure our success against his.

Our method of content creation is modeled on the studio system. We measure the popularity of our virtual stars against Hollywood’s real ones. Over the years, we have frequently created games based on the movies’ biggest names — and we now take pride when a movie occasionally develops a script based on one of ours. Angelina Jolie starred in two "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movies, which were based on the video game adventurer.

But in terms of reaching a mass audience, we are not quite ready for our close-up. Although video game sales and movie box-office receipts are similar in the U.S., movie sales, rentals and pay-per-view keep them far ahead of us.

We may even be headed in the wrong direction. A recent survey of U.S. high school students shows a trend: Young people who used to say they played games weekly now report they play only monthly. Sales have been declining for several months.

When we gather for the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the L.A. Convention Center this week, we may want to blame outside factors. But I fear we are doing much of the damage to ourselves. Most of us who create, publish, sell and consume video games see ourselves more as a tribe than representatives of society as a whole. We adopt our own beliefs and behaviors, and we often disregard those who don’t conform — not a prescription for market health.

Throughout recorded history, playing games has been a natural form of entertainment, practiced by all ages, all cultures and both genders. Our challenge is to bring more people to our modern version. In this sense, Hollywood can be a role model. The film industry welcomes all consumers, creating content with a wide appeal.

On the other hand, there are two significant ways in which we perhaps would be wise not to emulate the movies. First, video games have decisively adopted the high-risk business model of the blockbuster. For some new game machines, development budgets will reach $20 million, perhaps even $30 million — plus marketing costs. Even if retail prices rise, it will be increasingly difficult to recover costs if the audience is not growing.

Second, we would do well to consider what Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, describes as "the innovator’s dilemma." We are an industry that has spent many years "improving" our product along a single performance vector — in our case, graphical realism. But we are reaching a point of diminishing returns. Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects, we need to find other ways to improve.

Through the years, motion pictures have benefited from several significant technical advances. They added sound, then color … and air conditioning inside theaters. Only one of these — color — had to do with what was actually seen on screen. The other two enhanced the nature of how movies were enjoyed by stimulating other senses.

It’s funny how game developers keep getting confused about the fact that you can be inspired by something (Hollywood mass appeal) and simultaneously reject part of that something (studio business model). The bits on how we game developers are a tribe rather than representatives of society as a whole rings true today. Where are the elderly games, you know they’re going to be a majority in all countries pretty soon right? I’ve never seen any game developer besides myself on my blog wonder about computer games for elderly. The tribe.

We haven’t really moved on and that’s worrying.

Thank you for the inspiration. If you don’t know why Mr Iwata was so important here’s why from the LA Times:

Shortly before Iwata became Nintendo president in 2002, the company launched what became one of its bigger flops: the GameCube console, a successor to the Nintendo 64. The GameCube failed to outsell Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox, compelling Nintendo to rethink its direction.

Enter the Wii.

The Wii was instrumental in ushering in the modern era of casual gaming, as it was heavily based on motion controls and family-centric entertainment. The system, as well as Iwata’s corporate mandate, was drastically different from those of Nintendo’s competitors in the home video game console business.

Rather than focusing on technological achievements or becoming an all-in-one home media center, the Wii broadened the audience by enabling just about anyone to easily pick up and play a game. Games such as "Wii Sports," which lets people play virtual tennis with the wave of an arm, captivated the public.

In an opinion piece Iwata wrote for The Times in 2006, he argued that the game industry was becoming too closed-off to new consumers. He wrote that the industry should worry less about graphical enhancements and high-tech wizardry and instead look for ways to enhance “the emotional ways people interact with our games.”

Such a big influence. He’s the guys who made my parents play games on their TV, that’s the biggest feature ever. Even though I wish it had gone further, the Wii changed everything.

Badass programmer, project manager and Big Boss. I can’t help but think that this extremely high stress made him skip a good decade of life. RIP.

If there’s a part that always disappear in the computer game history, it’s the European scene. Americans don’t know anything about it, Japan the same. However a couple gems from the old continent like the famous Another World or Flashback changed the game and influenced tons of renowned game designers.

People have forgotten things like Ocean Software fighting Imagine Software which spawned Psygnosis, a legendary studio that created WipeOut and published Lemmings, made by DMA Design aka, Rockstar North aka the OG GTA developers. Digital Illusions making pinball games and ending up being DICE Sweden, creating Mirror’s Edge. Frederic Raynal and Alone in the Dark, Capcom says thank you very much. Lankhor capable of making a blazing fast Vroom and a slow paced non-linear adventure game like Maupiti Island at the same time, as Coktel Vision was capable of making an adventure game like Bargon Attack and ESS (European Space Simulator).

From 1985 to 1995 Europe produced tons of games, some being groundbreaking like Kick-Off by Anco Software, a soccer game where the ball wasn’t glued to players or Captain Blood by ERE Informatique (future Cryo), first person adventure game where you would try to communicate with aliens through icons or Starglider, a Starfox-like shooter in 3D seven years before Nintendo’s IP (Starglider, developed by Argonaut which is the company that will create the Super FX chip powering Starfox). In that period of time we went from 8 to 16bit. At that time optimism was high. Computer games were a couple years old and people thought it was for kids. In that decade developers were dreaming of maturity, already. Barbarian was inspired by Frank Frazetta’s work, not He-Man. I guess we always had that complex that play != kids. We have a lot of manchildren now I’m not sure we wanted that but anyway.

Germany is completely absent, which is weird for such a big force and big country in Europe. Well during the 90s Germany didn’t exist, culturally. We were not talking about German board games –huge there- or their love for simulations like the Settlers. All I could hear was how they were censoring blood in beat’em all and making Doom illegal. I wish I had had the internet and not have to listen to the media at that time.

Sports and cars games were immensely popular in that decade. But only in Europe we got to get games that were just plain weird and often bad. Some were too connected to one’s culture like most French games of that time. Some were just honest copies of something better (like Zool vs Sonic). But they had character when today’s games are mostly good, but all feel the same.

Bad games, wrong audience, US/Japan killing it, total lack of funding compared to US/Japan, massive hardware shift (N64/DC/PS1): the European gamedev scene collapse had to happen. Nonetheless, learn about it. The best ideas and the best code has been produced in this weird melting pot of different countries and cultures that is Europe.

If there’s something weird about games is that we never include people making them. We talk about budget, marketing, art and most of the time what it takes to have a pretty game. We talk about platforms but we forget people. Hundreds of dedicated humans are working hard for you to blow stuff up in open worlds but we only will talk about the publisher or console maker.

I believe people are center. Which is why I’m not satisfied with the state of the industry being either you work in a big studio making a nice living or on the other end you work on your game and you are not doing well at all. In the middle are a few lucky bastards. They shouldn’t be lucky bastards and there should be more of them. We’re hitting $100B of revenue a year soon, worldwide. The pie is big enough.

Another aspect that the news and game journalists narrative doesn’t cover: we’re all the same, we go back and forth between small companies and big ones. We freelance, we consult, we chat with our friends launching  small ventures or in big studios etc. Seasoned game developers like me have been through all company sizes, we work on games and it doesn’t really matter if it’s AAA AA indie mobile etc.  All that marketing talk doesn’t matter once you’re in the middle of making games. Then you think systems and teamwork and deadlines.

But game people are starting to own the discourse: in the past days and weeks, I saw a wave of “real talk” around game development and I think it is a good sign: The very last one on time spent on optimization. People talking about how Shenmue was overrated openly and how the kickstarter for the number III is a sad trend. Andreas Papathanasis telling the truth about graphic prowess, this article on the cultural fit shenanigans to Game Oven closing shop as well as ToT giving up on making games and an article on where and why Sunset failed.

Failures in games –art games to classic AAA- are people’s failure and organization failures that we could sum up this way: small teams are overworked and can’t do everything, big teams are so specialized that focus is lost.

Sunset would have needed some technical-design adjustments as much as the last Batman should have been tested more thoroughly. And both don’t really have excuses: Tale of Tales, veterans, knew that. There’s no way Rocksteady didn’t know about terrible framerate issues and how PC gamers would lose their shit.

If we respect players by giving them at least the minimum of what they want –a smooth running game-, they will respect us by buying our stuff. That’s how it works for everything else. And that’s how you achieve sustainability too. Hype or not, your mission is to deliver. And delivery means no bullshit.

Just some thoughts:

– Offering backward compatibility is a great “we respect you” sign. We change hardware rapidly but we play our games forever. MS obviously has some idea about how backward compatibility makes you stick somewhere.

– Same games over and over and that’s fine. Even outside AAA game development, developers make things they know how to make, they’ll just make it slightly different. Once again yes, games are hard to make so let’s make what we know we can do well! The polish level is high and all over the place. Tons of games look solid. This is good.

– All About Fans. It’s been a couple years like that and I’m not sure how to feel about it. Fans scare me a bit. Their devotion creeps me out a bit. Talking about communities around Hitman or Tom Clancy’s stuff freaks me out a bit. Who are you to obsess so hard over a fictional assassin game that you are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for or spend hundreds of hours on? Doesn’t seem healthy. But yeah, they’re needed (ask Prince about fans sustaining his ass for decades).

– All games land on Windows and all “Personal Computers” at some point. So much that there’s a conference about it. Going back to that backward compatibility, I think it’s huge: I can play any game I have ever played on my current laptop, that’s just awesome. People are starting to notice that. You can play/emulate/use probably 90% of any app ever made on any platform, on Windows. The back catalog is infinite and as nostalgia grows while we age, having one platform to do it all is fantastic.

– EA went from being considered the worst US company to being the one listening and paying attention, in a couple years. Bravo.

– European and Japanese game developers once again demonstrate a stronger aesthetic game than their US friends. Always the same reason: a wider variety of culture available growing up. It’s changing though: US millennials grew up with a wider culture, incorporating international influences.

TL;DR: same old stuff but some signs that things are getting more interesting. And more stable.

Game audio has become stale like a piece of bread in the back of a grocery store.

The game industry today has separated game audio into three things that should be almost only one: music, sound effects, implementation. So many games sound clean but feel soulless, I blame the absence of blending in the sound department. I mean, watch this series about Japanese “video game music” and its impact.

80s Japan was booming, game companies were rich and could innovate and take risks. But they were also hiring people who were capable of doing everything from music to SFX to implementation. Those games feel consistent for that very reason. It gave them life.

When they thought mixing rock beats and baroque melodies for Castlevania was a good idea and maybe add some cost to the cartridge by adding a sound chip (imagine the conversations about sound chip prices and benefit of a bigger sound)? So cool. Thanks to positive capitalism feedback loop, Japanese companies were willing to go for it. It was a race and they needed to stand out. It was a game.

We can all remember how cool that Castlevania/Konami music was for the rest of our lives though. There’s something timeless and definitive about sound.

Recognizing a game just hearing it blast through an arcade and being like “oh that’s definitely a Capcom game”, that’s just fantastic.

Successes keep showing the same trend: sound FXs need to be good enough, music needs to stand out. Bloodborne has really basic footstep sound FXs, no one cares. Hotline Miami has no 5.1 adaptive music system but great music is great music and will stay in people’s minds forever.

It’s not about accuracy and realism, guys. We’re making games. It’s fun. It’s wonky. It’s about intention. It’s about standing out. It’s about identity. Thousands of games ship every year now, they all need to stand out and audio is amazing for that.

What we should spend way more time on in game audio is DESIGN talks, not TECHNICAL talks. We have the tools, we’re fine. Implementation is trivial. It’s in the processes and intentions that I wish we had more “game audio grammar” used to determine what works, what doesn’t etc. So much to explore.

It’s amazing that we have full on technical flexibility but design wise we are very stiff: I see games with beautiful 2D cartoon style, chiptune music and realistic sound FXs and that’s just a weird aesthetic sandwich. Epic Orchestra is regardless of the type of gameplay something you will hear in any game these days. Programmers and game designers just love that shit. But there are over 200 different kinds of music out there. Strive for more uniqueness.

Games more than ever need soul. Audio is here for that.

I’m the player who smiles at your story and attempt to make it serious-like-movie-serious. I’m the player who presses whatever key to skip anything that is not gameplay. I’m the player who doesn’t read/listen to any existential shout outs between characters.

I so do not want to run that errand for that generic, lifeless NPC who’s talking and who I don’t listen  to. Having said that, there’s someone who makes me want to follow the story and read everything:

Ron Gilbert.

I mean, I’m not the only one and Ron got me when I was a kid so I guess he’s like that uncle who tells stories better than anyone in the family and I’m looking forward to the time when he’ll tell a new one. I think there’s a formula:

Mysterious agency and unexpectedness

I think Ron is like the Coen brothers: the basic plot is always simple but the way it will be treated will be good. You know it’s going to feel different. You know Ron treats you like an adult. Thimbleweed Park, his last game: Thimbleweed Park is the curious story of two washed up detectives called in to investigate a dead body found in the river just outside of town. […] Meanwhile, on the 13th floor of the Edmund hotel, Franklin wakes up with no idea how he got there. But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is that he’s dead. Spoiler: He’s not the body found just outside of Thimbleweed Park. Wow! That’s confusing. Don’t panic, we’re just as confused as you are. All about the journey and not the destination kind of design. I’m sold already.

Humor

Probably the hardest part. Ron uses that “90s Simpsons” style that always has been extremely efficient, regardless of where you’re from: The Simpsons probably aired there and you probably liked it. You know, the stupid puns and funny little phrases and regular pop culture jabs. The English non-sense, satire all the way… Very efficient stuff and I insist on the international traction at least for my generation. And what is great and that most people miss with humor and story based games is that it functions as a mechanic/reward: you explore dialogue and it’s going to end with a something funny, you smile next time you’ll try another branch.

In serious games with serious scenarios, you just go for the obvious and move on. It’s anti-exploratory. Humor solves that in a very elegant way. It is however really hard not to have a patchwork of different humor that works more or less like in most games.

I think those two marks are also parts of why Kentucky Route Zero is fantastic or how Oxenfree sounds pretty awesome though both are darker in tone.

This is the puzzle dependency/story chart for Thimbleweed, still in development. Ron says it’s the most complex he’s ever done. The development blog shows once again how making games is hard, even with a “simple”, old school adventure game. $0.6M is not much to build everything around that chart and make it come true.

Adventure games have a lot more to share with us. We need more awesome authors like Ron.

Just read that article on Why the Comic Book Store Just Won’t Die. I kind of extrapolated to computer games stores. Both thrive on niches and fandom. Computer games culture is 90% online now and there are many reasons to make that culture more of a local, real life thing.

So we had arcades back in the day. They were cool but dirty and exclusive, the business model doesn’t work with today’s world.

Bros and sticks

There has been a resurrection of arcades as barcades, which are pretty fun. I went a couple times to the one downtown LA and it’s great but in a way it doesn’t cover all computer game activities. It’s not centered around game culture, it’s using it.

What’s so great with comic book stores it’s their diversity in content. Anything for anyone, curated by unique humans. I think we need to make computer games something we can discuss and try outside our devices in our living rooms, browsing the internet while machines stupidly try to understand what game we would like to play.

Computer games shouldn’t be only played drinking beers in the evening. We play anytime. We should have computer game stores where we can chill and try out games with headphones on, really enjoying the process of trying something new, sharing impressions with other players directly and not through a text box and threads.

It shouldn’t be about finishing games so much than it is about enjoying playing games and ultimately buying them. Tons of comics and books are read and not finished by people all the time. Some games are way better once you’re invincible. What I’m saying is, to get a “better” computer game culture we need to focus on play more than win, hardcore punishment, twitch reflexes, etc.

If I could have a computer game store here in LA… The main floor would be dedicated to discuss and play games casually in bean chairs and classic desktop settings. Downstairs would be the action room: a 10 seat LAN setup (CS:GO), a big console setup for AAAs and a couple of MAME arcade machines meant to be brutalized like in the good old days (standing up and mashing those buttons is part of computer games DNA to me), maybe a couple pinballs because those are the shit.

This way I could talk Minecraft mods with a son, install that Contraption Maker game on a mom’s laptop, recommend Snakebirds or Gunpoint to a daughter, talk LAN games strategy with teenagers or what it takes to make that AAA game look like that or how the demoscene in Europe influenced tons of developers in the 1990s hey come back, I’m not done!

Now that’s culture. We need real, non-digital stores like this.