Category: Audio&Games

Start of a game development.

Game audio designer: Need some music?

Game developer: Fuck your music, I need sweet ass SFXs baby!

Game audio designer: Sure! Can I make some for you?

Game developer: Fuck no I’m fine with free samples, free is good for now.

Fine.

End of game development.

Game developer: DAMN I’M BURNING.

Game audio designer: still need some SFXs?

Game developer: YES, NO, MAYBE, PROBABLY, DEFINITELY.

Game audio designer: maybe some music too?

Game developer: NO, YES, NOT SURE, FUCK YOUTUBE KILLED MY TRAILER I NEED ORIGINAL MUSIC YESTERDAY.

You should stop seeing game audio people as vultures trying to make some paper on your back dear game developers, we’re all in this together. Whatever the project size, you’ll need audio. You’ll need someone to do it/deal with it, very quickly. Embrace it. Become professional in your output and dev process. Reduce the scope of visuals and pay attention to audio if needed, the resulting layer of polish will be more than worth it.

We are going toward a world of fanless computers as phones and tablets are showing us. It’s all about the Experience.

Audio is not an option, it’s required.

Awesome article from Greg Costikyan and yet, a bit obvious right? It says a lot that we need to discuss how to be ethical with F2P games when the main advantage for developers is sustainability of their jobs which translates into not screwing over users. How would you be against that? I don’t know but I’m glad that the word is out and generates comments. Because F2P is an important business model, not just for games. It’s getting better.

But I tend to prefer the “Pay Once, Play Forever” model discussed in a Jason Rohrer blog post on game pricing, the race to the bottom in app stores, to the back to back Steam sales and super lucrative bundles.

Jason wants to get money on day one because it makes sense when you’re working on a game over a couple of years. The simple fact that we in the industry feel that it’s normal to go on and on without revenue is crazy. Also, “free” means assholes trolling you and making you feel miserable after some hard work. We see those comments on app stores all the time.

Games doing well with this POPF business model (Minecraft, Terraria, Garry’s mod) all share something though: they’re almost like tools. They are not just games, they let people create and make stuff. That’s very interesting because not only those games are ethical in their pricing, they also allow their users to not just grind or escape, but build and design things.

It means that once you have your game core concept pretty solid, a prototype, you should think about how to monetize that shit while being fair to both you and the user. You need to balance out your evilness and it’s a pretty cool game in itself.

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.

It was bad. Not just business wise but as Raph Koster points out in his blog post:

But this was the year when an editor at a games publication actually said to me “stop writing.” This was the year that the metaphors of violence were the most popular way to describe what we should be doing to each other’s life work and passions. Burning down. Destroying.

The game industry in 2013 felt like that to me too.

I’m a game developer and reading that an editor at a games publication can actually say “stop” to someone who contributes to the game design community as much and as hard as Raph does (and when people minimize that I just think STFU you don’t know shit), says it all. Something is super rotten in the game industry. I don’t know how to react except prototyping on my own and reading arguments.

I’m a game audio designer and all I heard about all year long was audio implementation and 3D sound and HDR and things that are absolutely not core to a great game audio experience. Tons of games don’t use that at all and have great audio. Needs for more audio interactivity and flexibility are shared by all my peers in the field and yet, nothing changes. We use the same inherently broken audio stream design. It’s been a while now. Like over a goddamn decade. It became taboo.

We like to remind ourselves of how a couple of people pretty much had solutions to seamless, atomic game audio end 80s or how Nintendo masters game audio design since Mario but the game industry is not about mentors or spreading knowledge, it’s about being violently childish (Fmod vs Wwise yay). Back to Raph being humiliated online, back to Chris Crawford –kind of the father of us all, amirite- treated like “fuck that old weird dude”. Back to that article where professional game developers can’t wrap their heads around the idea of people having fun driving a cleaning truck in a simulation. I don’t know, jumping on platforms for 30 years seems pointless to me too and also, your mom albeit being old is still a ton of fun. You get the point, to each his own. Good designers know that. They analyze, they don’t laugh at taste or worse, bully you (super condescending title, Gamasutra) because you don’t play the last AAA or the last indie darling. There is no hierarchy in games, it’s like music.

Anyway, a lot of people profit that situation of intellectual stagnation and game design idling. From that editor to Raph to guys selling sound banks and focusing on how important having $50K worth of microphones will change your game audio forever, it’s not about games. It’s about business and I’m just as naive as ever: if we move on, their business will fail. If tomorrow someone comes up with a cheap, responsive audio engine that does what games need and not what sound people want Fmod and Wwise would bleed.

Computer games complexity is such that a lot of people are living out of it, without asking the good questions or caring about where it goes, what we can do with them. The mutation is slow. I blame rent and living wages.

20 years of Doom. It itches. First time I heard and saw it, Joystick Magazine #37, April 1993. Page 118.

Thanks a ton to Abandonware-Magazines and my memory.

Then my PC game dealer –Ze Warez- obviously had it later on. I’m from that older Wolfenstein3D school so Doom was the iteration. What an iteration though. It’s almost like if Nintendo had done Mario and  then, Mario World. In the article it says that it would perfectly run on my machine and I was amazed and skeptical that it would and it fucking did.

Bear with me, I was a kid who after years of playing on mom’s IBM PC some awful CGA games just wanted some cool games on his 386 DX 33, like all those fuckers in the UK on their Amigas and STs or my friends on consoles. Two years later Commodore is dead and I get to play Wolf and Doom, two games that were unique and quite impossible to make on any other platform at that time.

Talk about Revenge of The Nerd.

Also, tons of fun. Tons of customization and first taste of game dev tools. Just passing the language barrier in itself was some work (‘member, no internet, only books). I remember making an audio track of myself dying through the infamous Doom’s chainsaw sounds. The total freedom! It was a degamified game, it was fun being a god or a piece of shit in a room with no ammo.

Doom is important to the game culture because of the focus on technology and 3D. What people very fast forgot is that Doom was also optimized and run well on a large variety of machines. Most developers will not care about performance scaling for the next twenty years (also computer’s architecture evolution made it nearly impossible). Today as Moore’s law is now BS, they have to (or they do 2D).

ID Software made its name doing the costly optimization on its own. Sudden and huge trust and respect from millions of players? Priceless. People forget that aspect. ID cared. You never forget that.

I preferred Duke Nukem 3D to Quake because I didn’t care about more technology at that time. I was good having fun with what we had. Plus it was asking some hardware upgrade, the start of the out of control spiral where things get twice as fast every six months. That gave birth to the “PC Master Race” as Reddit call those guys who play on 7 GHz space shuttles with a keyboard and a mouse, but it also sent people to the super awesomely accessible Playstation so hard that Microsoft had to answer with their own box.

With game development being more platform agnostic than ever, It feels like we’ve seen it all and that now as it should have been from the start, hardware is hardware and the two lessons I’ll keep from Doom are:

– Make the best tech for the best game you want.

– Be nice.

The Smash Brothers, a documentary about Smash Bros Melee’s scene.

Interesting:

Competitiveness in games. There’s something amazing about a non-corrupt state where people respect each other and just have fun, while trying to be the best. It has become so rare.

Wife’s speech skills are way above average. That dude makes you want to buy a GameCube and a copy of SSBM asap.

A scene like that would never emerge in France due to terrible people behavior (stealing, stealing, stealing, everyone shitting on your passion).

Interracial. In the US, seeing interracial stuff is rare so I’m always happy when I see some black white Asian people around a TV. It’s still nothing but it’s still something.

Nintendo’s denial. They didn’t want that game to become competitive but it happened so instead of acting out against it, they should have embraced it. But Nintendo is a very, very conservative company despite being innovative. They are obsessed with mainstream without understanding that competitive and mainstream can totally go together, see most sports on TV? Though I totally understand that trash talk and absence of women in these competitions don’t suit a corporation very well. But they could help, instead of hiding.

I hadn’t had the time to watch the SSBM scene golden era, so it was good catching up.

Just read this article and it made me think that there’s a big problem with Valve’s approach, perfectly resumed in one sentence from a comment:

We will need to have a computer for doing everything else and a SteamBox to play, fragmenting even more the gaming ecosystem.

Which ruins Newell’s argument about making SteamOS an open platform: for people, it’s another silo to deal with.

I can do everything I want on my laptop, like a lot of people. It’s very convenient. Through the past decade we’ve all been going back and forth on using tools that do multiple things at a time and some that just do one thing. To each his own (yes, I still use a small mp3 player with its 22 hours of battery life).

For games though, I think the tendency is to have one machine that does games AND other stuff. Consoles went this way. Tablets too, as PCs always have been. We are in the “good enough” for most people, dedicated machines are for a core audience. Steam is trying to sell software and movies too, trying to widen so maybe they want to compete directly with all the big ones who have larger pockets, already acquired users,  traction, devices etc. Good luck.

Steam, as a cool digital store was fine. A lot could be done to make it less “brogamer” and a perfect destination for more casual gamers, going more experimental, hosting game jam games etc.

If I was Dell or Lenovo or Acer, I’d jump on the opportunity to make those sweet living room PCs though. The PC market is vaguely shrinking because these guys don’t innovate at all or do blindly. It’s sad to see.

I guess that’s why Valve started this Steam Invasion.

Good stuff. There’s only one problem in his talk: TV, like games got structural changes that pushed a couple of companies like HBO or Showtime to go against the trend of syndication and commercial breaks, creating better shows, right?

Well the example of Breaking Bad falls flat because it’s from AMC, which has commercial breaks and is subject to government and industry regulations (one “fuck” allowed per season for Walter White and his friends).

AMC has been capable of creating better TV (Mad Men, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad are all critically acclaimed) within classic TV constraints.

How AMC did it? Their history was to broadcast classic films, without commercials. It didn’t work well. They went on full on new IPs, with commercial breaks. Massive success. Also, it took them almost ten years (they started original programming in 2002).

Which means that maybe, you can create better games within F2P constraints, right? Maybe it will take us a decade or more to figure it out.

It will be scary. Games are so much more powerful on the mind than TV ever could be.

Big news in the world of hardware and graphics.

Nvidia just announced a streaming system to play on your TV with heavy graphic computation being done in your office room or basement on loud computers.

AMD announced a couple of weeks ago Mantle, a low level API for its graphic cards.

Both technology are working on current gen. For the very first time since GPUs exist, the new graphic generation is not based on completely new hardware but on software features and enhancements. It was already the case for the past few years but now manufacturers just don’t hide it anymore.

It makes sense now that each of these marvel of technology are in the billion transistors count (7.08 billion-transistor chip for the very last AMD card, it is mind-blowing). Moore’s law is so slowing down (14nm is a bitch, ask Intel about yield).

AMD and Nvidia have to sell more cards that are today absolutely under-used or way too expensive. Even PC enthusiasts don’t upgrade anymore. No one wants to change to Intel’s Haswell as well.

It’s a massive industry shift and I think everyone is going to benefit: users with better app performances and still a wide range of choice, AMD and Nvidia don’t have to rush products out anymore and developers get more market stability than ever.

I sure hope it will push game developers to spend more time on things like AUDIO and INPUT. ‘bout time.

Also manufacturers, slow down on 4K BS. I have yet to see a game programmer happy about 4K textures and the shit storm that will come with managing that asset size just to please a couple of rich dudes out there is not something they’re looking forward to.

Look at all our highly-rated games, look at this embarrassment of riches.  It gives the unmistakable impression that videogames today are basically great.  Even though they’re not.  They’re really not.

Wow. On videogame reviews.

I obviously concur with this. But it goes way deeper than game critic. A recent article with Chris Crawford, a dude who’s been making videogames since 1973 says that he doesn’t need to play games these days to know if a game is good or interesting or none of that. Immediately someone commented that he was stupid and that he should go away. Thirteen industry people agreed.

To me, if one of the oldest computer game designer known is saying that he doesn’t play games anymore because they’re all the same, I just nod. I don’t need to play Bioshock Infinite to get a sense that this FPS makes no sense. A couple of videos and reviews from different people –that is, no professional review-  demonstrate it. I avoid graphic porn because it makes us tech dudes way too soft on what games actually are. So a dude with 40 years of experience designing games yeah, I get that he doesn’t need to play the last GTA. That’s like, duh. But no, people get nasty and immediately dis him.

The lack of humility and respect around and in the game industry is something, man. You’ve got to be a fan for something, hardcore. Expert. I was glad the article brought in Little Big Planet and how it’s been overrated because it’s cute. It was the poster child for “a new era”. Heavy Rain, same. But every time I would criticize those games because they’re not so great, people would jump and think I have a problem or that I’m just a hater because “you use Windows”.

Look at how polarized people are around deities that brands have become. We’re speaking of Sony “community”. Xbox “community”. People buying a Wii U “by loyalty for Nintendo”. Console “wars”. Exclusive games mean you don’t have it, I DO TAKE THIS. There is no adult behavior. It’s embarrassing.

Games can’t mature if society as a whole just keeps getting more childish (remember iOS people going crazy because Instagram was coming to Android? What in the actual fuck).

So we need to step up. We need to stop being so complacent about our medium, hard.