Category: Audio&Games

Whatever.

Got into an interesting discussion on FB about game prices and sales on iOS, leading to the conclusion: you need to do F2P to survive.

I don’t like it because it goes toward a polarization where you either make AAA or free to play mobile games. This article just compares the two where obviously, F2P resonates as smarter development.

We need a middle ground. I think a middle ground is healthy. You want to let things slip to “what people want” fine, we developers and consumers have everything to lose in this equation and platforms everything to gain from. Consumers don’t know what they want, don’t know game production costs and if you just let them go for free, they’ll choose free. It doesn’t mean they’re right. Saying we don’t control nothing is BS. We have impact, we make and sell these games. We set that shit up.

People selling things have an impact, can change things around. Apple entered the smartphone market and said “this is how we think this should work, we don’t give care about what you are used to, you’ll like it”. Mojang did the same with a $10 alpha game.

Don’t focus on the fact that they are exceptions, look at the odds: who would have thought they would be so, so massively successful to the point of being that iconic? Fucking no one, not even them. So with odds so bad and tremendous success, I think that there’s room for games with better odds and not that crazy of a success but enough to sustain their stuff and make people happy.

This is what we should aim for. It’s super hard, I’m aware of that but it’s slowly coming. I’m glad Gone Home or Kentucky Route Zero or many others have a fair price and I hope they will be successful enough to sustain those teams and prove the model.

I hate this “me too”, “follow the herd” mentality. It’s not because it’s popular that you should do it. You don’t have to go F2P as you don’t need to make a Super Mario clone just because “people like platformers!”. On the question of joining iOS game development, just censorship should push people to ask themselves why would they develop for Apple. We have internalized it, by design we will not think different. We’re sacrificing freedom of speech for convenience and brand loyalty. It’s “cool” to do stuff for this platform that doesn’t make anyone live but a ridiculous minority and these questions about freedom of speech are so annoying and serious!

Fair enough, it seems like society doesn’t want any middle for anything either and also, relegates freedom or respect as artifacts. It’s matching.

With a really good story, you don’t want to do anything. You don’t have time for that, your focus is on what’s going on. It’s by design, totally the opposite of a game and its engagement. The story IS the game itself, a game so powerful that it demands that you don’t do any inputting. The input is in the multiplayer part, the discussion you have with your friends. The experience is about listening and watching, analyzing the situation every now and then, weighing all along while the story unfold in a very controlled, designed way. Pressing L1 and R1 alternatively will only add clutter and noise to the flow. I’m probably not the only one trying to imagine Breaking Bad The Game but it just would be silly. Cooking Meth Mama uh, no.

Stories are mind games that don’t require input. It’s pure like that. The only exception I see is for humor –it is fun to input in- but then it is much harder to target a wide audience compared to drama. Drama is universal, Comedy isn’t!

The paradox today is that it’s never been easier to make games. But we never had that many insipid games and one of the reason is that they use some kind of generic middleware. Like all these third person games based on Unreal technology, or these platform games made in Unity. They all have the same feel. The same can be said with music, all made with the same samplers or action movies all shot and rendered with the same technology.

If we look at the best computer games ever, most if not all are built on custom made technology, custom made tools and custom made engine. From the Marios to the Sonics to Doom to Ico to GTA, they all have been made from scratch. The same can be said with music, from Jimi Hendrix custom pedals to Skrillex’s plugins or movies with Kubrick’s special lenses. Custom means character, means standing out, means being different. It might not be enough to be great, but it’s a good start!

I’m playing Just Cause 2 and the engine gives you an amazing sense of scale, is beautiful and runs well. Impossible to get that with any middleware. Same with Soul Bubbles or The Witness, immediately recognizable through their own charm. JC2 aesthetic is horrible –generic military stuff- but the game engine is so good that it’s a lot of fun to navigate the world, attaching planes to mountains and stuff like that.

Obviously with games it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s also about mechanics. Systems are built in order to support a particular gameplay. Custom systems are not that flexible and might only be used once or need to be heavily modified.

Will generic tools be mastered enough that personality will come out of what will be produced with them? Or will we have to start engine from scratch forever if we want to explore great ideas? I just know that people capable of coding low level tech while having a high level design mind are rare. I don’t know if we’re losing them with tools like Unity but a lot of youngsters really think they can do anything with a couple of middleware.

There’s a terrible lack of legacy and learning from older generations in the game business. May game engines soul stay strong.

I’m playing Burnout Paradise. It’s an open world where you just drive and race. You can’t have a custom soundtrack. You have to navigate terrible menus to turn the music off and let your music player play in the background if you want your own music. You can’t escape the intro with Guns & Roses’ Paradise City playing loud. Ugh.

In game, when you go fast and jump with your car, the music is filtered like house music dynamically to the length of the jump. Neat. but of course and sadly, it doesn’t work with your music. It’s technically easy to do.

Open world games, especially the ones including using different types of machines to go around, should allow custom music. It is so satisfying to roam inside a world to your favorite beat or anthem. It’s personal, the game magically becomes a little more yours.

It looks like GTA V, is not going to allow custom playlists. As it was possible on previous hardware for the past ten years so, I wonder if it’s a business issue: labels make a deal with Rockstar and in return they have to cut any music competition out from the world of GTA. For music labels, GTA is a way to promote and sell albums so custom playlists are a threat.

In any case, it’s annoying but thanks to the PC, I can still manage to drive down a Burnout Paradise hill with this in my ears:

It changes everything.

One of the most challenging projects in the game is paying off the mortgage on one’s house. Animal Crossing allows players to upgrade their homes, but doing so requires paying off a large note the player must take out to start the game in the first place. Then the player must pay renovation mortgages for even larger sums. While the game mercifully omits some of the more punitive intricacies of long-term debt, such as compounding interest, improving one’s home does require consistent work in the game world. Catching fish, hunting for fossils, finding insects, and doing jobs for other townsfolk all produce income that can be used to pay off mortgage debt—or to buy carpets, furniture, and objects to decorate one’s house.

Animal Crossing, by Ian.. I played it for months back in 2006 when it came out on the Nintendo DS. Soothing. But not that part. What was great to me was the connection with real time and the fact that I would just hang out on the beach.

I don’t get the collect/consume design in games. It’s dull and pointless, doesn’t make me learn anything, doesn’t make me feel smart, doesn’t make me feel good except for a short amount of time between the previous grind and before the next one.

I’m always impressed how a cute style, curvy and funny characters can make you grind like a bitch in hell.

I know about different gameplay style, Keirsey Temperament, GNS Theory and all that but like I wrote three years ago, we need to step up and make moves as designers: yes, we want to make people feel good and smart. No, we don’t want them to spend hundreds of hours collecting things regardless, because it is not a behavior we want to teach. It’s not an ideal we want to spread out. We have already too much of that.

Ian suggests that it’s part of AC’s game design, to make you realize this: Animal Crossing can be seen as a critique of contemporary consumer culture that attempts to persuade the player to understand both the intoxication of material acquisition and the subtle pleasures of abstention. I think it makes you act like a collector and, that’s all there is to me. The consequences of what you do with your collection of stuff are totally secondary. The main course is collecting and chilling. I don’t need to play any other AC.

Sure Jon, but how many game developers just don’t care, how many have an audio engine running in alphas? How many have a precise idea of what they want early, even before having visuals? How many game developers know that sound can help locking a game style or a gameplay? How many see audio as a way to juice up to the max? How many see sound as a chore? How many love old school 90s Japanese games but never searched to know what their process of making games was (page 6 and 7)?

What made their games so sonically compelling and I’m enlarging to all the audio including music, is that in Japanese game development audio is taken seriously. It’s simple, not easy!

There’s a problem of design with most of Western game development: In games if we want to give the best experience possible, music and sfxs are going to play together. They can’t be really sandwiched on top of a game. This is what we do a lot today with mixed results oscillating between unremarkable or “in your face” audio.

When it is like in Antichamber or Hotline Miami –two completely different games- it’s a beautiful dance between short audio feedback cues and wide, long mood triggers that soundscapes are (yes in my head, I put songs in the soundscape folder). It’s not about technical details, it’s not about 3D or HRTFs it’s about balance between information and feel.

There’s no more SFX and Music. There’s Game Audio. It should be the norm. Embrace it.

Playing The Cave. It’s cool and terrible at the same time. I like the concept, Ron is always good at telling stories and creating characters. But for the rest…

I don’t understand how moving characters can feel so meh when it’s the main thing you do. Their animation is weird, something feels like they run at 15 fps when water effects are sumptuous and feel like they’re real. It’s the biggest problem with a lot of games today: look good if not fantastic, feel not so good. Shader effects are top notch but basic movements are generic.

There’s a lot of going up and down. A lot. I can tell that designers worked hard to minimize this aspect through levels but it still feels really tedious sometimes.

Where I thought it would be kind of charming is with audio and it wasn’t. Just exactly what I pointed out, it’s technically clean but nothing really matters or stays in your mind, things fade in fade out in the background, no theme or mini melody you can sing under the shower, everything is about voice over. It feels cold, which kind of works with the title The Cave but hell I don’t know, it’s just not satisfying to me. The experience is missing something in the sound department. It could be so much cooler.

I don’t know if game developers realize that a lot of people are waiting for sales because plenty of games are kinda cool but are also kinda not clean cut enough to be bought at full prize. Even if I know that The Cave is still a pretty big game that required a lot of work and people involved. Making games is also pretty ungrateful.

Might replay in a year for another run. Next, Antichamber.

Making games is risky and hard, right? You need to make it profitable (and for those who still don’t understand simple economics, the game needs to be profitable so that you can think making another one).

That’s the premise. So you’d think game developers would reduce risks, at least a little bit.  But these are the trends these days:

-Make exclusives, trying to be system-sellers. I think the 90s are over and system sellers are unicorns today. The masters of system selling, Nintendo, haven’t really done it since Wii Sports seven years ago. People buy their devices, there will be (good) games on it, the end.

-Actually they are not really exclusives. Players know the game will eventually come to their platform, especially if people are on WinSteam. Everything ends up there, eventually. People adore sales and always will.

-Be the first big buzz on a new platform, even if the platform is pretty much inexistent for now (Leap, Ouya, XB1 PS4).

-Avoid a big platform with no competition (Win8), dedication for a big platform with insane competition (iOS).

In some way, game developers add as much risk as they can on an already very risky software business. I mean, it’s just weird. Even weirder, navigating this professionally.

Excellent note from Frank Lantz on the EVO tournament.

Fighting games are about jumping and punching, but they are also about science. They are about reverse-engineering the fundamental properties of complex software, exploring the limits of perception, decision, and action, mapping the borderlands between humans and machines. They are about strategic analysis and technical innovation, about forming hypotheses and testing them, developing theories and collaborating to build a shared body of knowledge.

Fighting games are about competition, but they are also about empathy, not as a fuzzy concept to pay homage to but as a guiding principle of absolute necessity – Yomi, the ability to see the world through your opponent’s eyes as they see through yours, to directly experience their pride, their fear, their knowledge, their ignorance, and to indirectly experience your own, to overcome them by becoming them, by becoming something that is neither one of you alone.

That is exactly what Counter-strike brings in, only you are not 1 VS 1 jumping and punching in 2D but 5 VS 5 running and shooting in 3D.

It’s insanely deep. There are so many things possible. Because it’s team based, because rules are so strict –you can “die” with one bullet- I’ve never seen more empathy in games than in CS: people buying weapons for their teammates, people sacrificing themselves for the team to win are common treats. Players would drop their weapons to make noises (and confuse the other team) and I’m not even talking about all the nasty lol-induced things you can do with grenades. It’s really about fucking your opponent team’s mind up, using bugs if necessary: you can plant a bomb on a map in a way that, it can’t be defused because it’s unreachable or how we all run with the knife to go faster.

Fighting games are about violence, but they are also about violence transmuted into something like poetry. This is the alchemical magic of games. Chess slows thought down in order to observe its properties, fighting games speed thought up to the point where thinking shades into acting, where the two categories stop being distinct, like a particle accelerator for the mind.

And CS does both. During a match, let’s say a quarter of finals or finals, players spend a huge amount of time placing themselves at the good spot. They temporize. They use silence as a massive pressure tool on the other team. Once everyone is at its position, it’s like a fighting game: it’s all about speed, coordination and breathing slowly. It’s super intense, it’s as if in a fighting game you could lose at each punch or kick you receive. The spectrum of social events and emotions in CS is amazing: companionship when you start, running with your buddies. Organization when you get ready to do what you have to do while having the back of your mates, talking, chatting, sending “affirmative” on the radio. Fear, suspicion, nervousness when things get closer. Pain, when you get hit so hard at the first exchange and that you know you need to retreat behind your team. Guilt. Losing trust when your teammate shoots you, a second time. Humility, when someone saves you because, it really means something in this game. The desperation when shit hits the fan and that you pretty much go kamikaze. The hilarity of dumb ass situations (two dudes running in circle, reloading). The sheer, massive joy when everything went like you wanted to (I read your mind, bitch! And my team rocks!). All that in a what, 10 minutes game? It’s fabulous.

I’ve never encounter any game that propels you into this zone and enjoyment of setting up things and then go go go with your four mates. It’s one of the most social game I have ever played because you really need to bond with your team. CS pace is a jewel.

That fighting games are a kind of cognitive artform tells us something about video games and about computers, but it also raises questions about other kinds of games – Basketball, Tennis, the “sweet science” of Boxing. Are these purely physical games as purely physical as they seem, or are they too, under the hood, more intelligent then they look?

Or course they are. Games are defined by rules and physical games –sports- have awesome tight, rules. For instance just the simple fact that in basketball as long as the ball is not in your hand when the buzzer buzzes you can score (it’s almost a hack, isn’t it?) gave us mind blowing games and emotions. Even how sports are often designed so that teams exchange field side during half time or how tennis is such a mental game (you can tell by watching games or if you played Virtual Tennis), show that they are far more than just physical activities. They are super heavily play tested games with very stable rules, to me. So they are very interesting.

Back to CS. Amazing balance (I wouldn’t be surprised if the 5 VS 5 came from basketball). What I notice between competitive games and sports is that they usually have hard rules with the less randomness, luck possible. Which is why they create such drama and attract people. Also, they are usually pretty easy to play and this is where to me that fighting games fail: it’s fairly complex today. Street Fighter II was deep, but easy to enter. Now listen to KoF XIII:

The first of the three is the new EX Mode, which convert each character’s super moves into more powerful versions that allows one bar from the player’s power gauge for EX Special Moves and two bars from the player’s power gauge for EX Desperation Moves. Another new feature is the Hyper Drive mode,

I mean, no. I don’t want to learn that shit. It’s easy to explain CS to a newbie and there are thousands of hours of depth behind. “you follow that dude to that destination, protecting him” “you keep your position so no one comes in”. Anyone understands that, it’s like soccer: the goal is this, you can’t do that, move. Moving in a 3D space is not harder than hitting perfect combos on gamepads and in CS it’s never been so fair: I’ve seen excellent Quake III players get eliminated as fast as newbies because their 3D skills didn’t matter: you still can be shot dead in one click while your rocket jump will not happen.

Finding a balance between a low barrier to entry while managing huge depth in a game is a very, very hard task. And that’s why once it works, you don’t freaking change anything, maybe upgrade it a bit (Street Fighter IV’s producer has stated that he wanted to keep the game closer to Street Fighter II).

Counter-Strike never really changed, for that very reason. I haven’t played it in ten years and it’s still in my mind. You change its theme, change the real bullets to paintball and to me it’s one of the purest, most social computer game I have ever played. And it will be very hard, like popular sports like soccer to take its crown away. This game is kind of perfect. Honest.

I’m rebooting myself on game audio, thinking about what really made me want to start that weird job. Playing a large array of games from the 90s to now these days.

Maybe I should do a 3 point “why game audio is still so obscure?” post because it’s always made games much better, the last one I played for which it’s totally the case being Hotline Miami.

1. Game audio became too technical.

Thanks to the AAA industry a lot of game audio is about 3D audio, High Dynamic Rendering and other 7.1 requirement that pretty much -and I know, it hurts- no one cares about. Meanwhile game audio design goes toward the less is more approach which leaves us with background audio fading in and out while dialog takes the main piece of the game audio cake.

I come from a time when game audio was literally made to tractor beam kids to arcade machines blasting kicks and punches, electro bass and sticks clickety-clicks.

In 2013 kids play on soundless touch, mobile devices with shitty headphones at best, no sound at worst. Parents play on their couches in the evening, with the sound on moderate if not low volume after a hard day. Nothing technically or socially that matches what “technical” sound design requires to enjoy it at its best.

I feel like there’s a tremendous difference between what’s going on the market and what game audio designers do. So we end up with very rough, fill-in game audio for 80% of games, 10% with Hollywood-like audio budgets and 10% that are doing something that makes sense (indie games, mostly).

2. Game audio is too hermetic.

I’m from the Mizuguchi school of thoughts which could be described as “there is no difference between Audio and Visual, it’s all one experience with computer games.” So I obviously see all audio to be one experience. Of course there are different fields but let’s blend more, sound folks. Game audio is a mix of different skills. Everything should go together in a better way than in a weird sandwich way, like we often do these days. Old arcade games have great sound design signatures from sound effects to music to voice over. and it goes with the visuals too. It’s tight.

It feels like before game audio was part of the experience when it’s now more on the side of production value (bigger game, more developed audio).

It’s changing, developers are back on caring for audio (all the last indie games shine on that).

3. Game audio doesn’t do music enough and voice over too much.

It’s almost something entirely shifted from game audio and it shouldn’t be. Choosing the type, designing the music should totally be part of the game audio designer’s job. It’s amazing how soporific music became in games with the advancement of 3D graphics. The last game music people talk about§remember are from early 2000s, and most are from the 80s/90s. It says something. We need to be more bold about it. Never forget Sagat stage, one of the weirdest game music ever and absolutely memorable because it fits that moment in the game (almost the end), that character, that mood. Composed by Alph Lyla, Capcom in-house band made of composers and sound designers. See what I mean? We totally lost that or let’s say that it’s too rare.

Past the novelty of it mid 90s –people in the game talking to me, yay!- I’ve never been a fan of voice-over (well explained here). In Skyrim you’re looking at 60,000 lines of dialogs. Mass Effect 3, 40,000 lines. It’s great and all but mid-sized developers shouldn’t dream of doing the same but dig around others aspects of game audio that would cost less and impact I would say, even more than hours of acting. Because seriously, there’s also a whole lot of terrible dialogs out there.

Even on the technical part we never pushed forward true adaptive music, like it was back in the day (music accelerating with the timer approaching zero, muting instruments, starting page 10). So, what’s up with that?

4. Game audio is not core to development enough.

When it is, it always works for the better. But mostly, it’s at the end of a game almost done. And that’s as bad as it gets to make something as great as possible. Despite knowing exactly why and how making a game is so intense, that sound is suddenly low priority it doesn’t change the fact that audio needs to be thought as early as possible and in-game asap too. It’s a battle, I’m making an almost audio-only game so in this case, I’m in the center from the start. For once. Sigh.

Game audio is so fascinating because no one is paying attention to it and yet it does change, elevate things like nothing else.