Category: Audio&Games

Ha the game industry Twitter feuds, opinions, DRAMA.

Random thoughts:

– I constantly wish that I and everybody else would be capable of what designer-programmers like Chris Hecker or Jon Blow can do. I mean, it would be much easier and faster to make games when you can code your ideas and share them with people capable of doing the same. It’s just super hard and I’m kind of jealous of their skill set and I think that’s why they’re considered being part of another class of people, which is kind of true. In a good way for me. I aim for this. I want that. teh skillz.

– Greenlight? I don’t know we’ll see how it goes, meanwhile sell your game on the internet, jeez. Take a side on this walled garden bullshit, keep your independence because soon you might not have any choice at all. It’s crazy, we waited for digital distribution to escape Walmart’s dictatorship but we rush to online Walmarts. I guess we didn’t get it.

– Race is so absent from any debate about games and game culture, it’s amazing in a world with a black president, 9/11 stuff and religious wars. No subtlety, nothing. The game culture is getting as isolated as comics are, which is something we tried to avoid but I guess same stalled crowd, same effect. Meanwhile EA and Activision are probably selling about half of their FIFA/MADDEN/CoD to “minorities”. Yay.

– I can’t listen to chiptune in games anymore. Chiptune is only a rendering technique and we kind of should stop using all the freaking time. It’s so fueled by nostalgia. It’s so dorky. I don’t want more acid in my ears, that’s why the 16bit era also was so awesome, at least for me. And really today sometimes it just feels plain wrong like with Spelunky on XBLA, super smooth visuals+acid rendered music= awkward. Compositions are great and fit the game, the 8bit rendering doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter, it’s a hardcore gamer game and they’re listening to chiptunes all the time. Same with Super Hexagon. But if the creative process is “hey I was making this game and listening to this so hey, I’m just going to use this music I was listening to”, I think it’s pretty lame. Music can broaden your audience or a big audio/visual opposition can create something amazing (Crystal Blue Persuasion used in Breaking Bad when they’re cooking meth, the famous Gear of War trailer, Samuraï Champloo’s beats, the Dead Island trailer etc)  but once again I guess it doesn’t matter when the game is already targeted to hardcore people with pre-made tastes. Let’s just not try anything on this side of game development, let’s just be super classic and unanimously praise this perfect predictability. Well no I don’t want to, we can do better.

It’s not about copyright, IP, F2P, piracy. I have no problem with games as service as well.

It’s something about computer games and business model, it’s the elephant in the room: we don’t master game development. We don’t.

@tiedtiger wrote:

If you are struggling with the same moral question, then my advice is simple: Get over it. Repeat sales is a basic business model, used from fine restaurants to lowly casinos.

Casinos and restaurants master every single thing involved in their processes, this is how they make money, not so much because they repeat sales (it’s not so much the volume it’s the margin, ask Apple). Decades, centuries of experience. A restaurant knows exactly how it’s going to work out for that red velvet cake, restaurants have a worldwide map of  people’s taste/costs to produce meals today. It’s known. Casinos have the house edge. No mystery, randomness close to zero.

Us? We have incompatible tools, we have no idea who we are aiming for, we have no  game audio standard, we reinvent the wheel constantly and we never know exactly when a cake game is done!  We breath chaos.

We never know exactly when a game is done and what is going to take to please people. People don’t know either.

Therefore the F2P paradigm doesn’t work so well if at all, and that’s my problem with it. It’s a timing problem.

I give some tracks and songs for free. I know what it takes to make a song and also know what it takes to make a game, a polished game. It’s way harder than anything I have ever done, add the fact that you don’t know what you will sell in a F2P scenario (everything is possible) and that if you make bad choices you can kill two years of work instantly, I mean it’s suicidal right?

That’s why I still think the shareware model, free demo (generous), paid game (from let’s say $2 to $20) and of course micro-transactions later seems the strongest and fairest way to sustain a gamedev team and make people happy. Nothing greedy in this (I’m talking about independent developers here, obviously).

I don’t want players to think making games as a funny hobby. It’s hard work. I think we shot ourselves in the foot by selling $.99 games, people have NO IDEA how hard -or long- it is to make a great game, that stupid price made them believe that it’s actually easy and painless. The ratio amount of work/money made is the worst of any kind of entertainment. To go back to Tadhg’s analogy, people have a notion of what is going on in their plate at a restaurant. They have no idea with the freshly downloaded title on their digital device.

I think we need to stop running for virtual gold mines or leaning on the good old brick & mortar past. We should start being honest with the audience, educate people, that will help shaping up better connections with players leading to better games. We will learn more, have better tools, tweak all that until it’s running perfectly well.

Like for food the business model angle or the art angle will blend and we will be ready to embrace a MasterGameDesigner show on TV.

HexGL

HexGL, Wipe Out clone in HTML5 by a French man, yay!

Nice controls, yay!

No sound, boooo.

And I know why, HTML5 audio is a mess and the Web Audio API isn’t solving anything! Code once, run anywhere REMEMBER? Well it mostly works for visuals, please make it work for AUDIO ffs. Holy fucking shit when are we going to learn like never, apparently. No offense but a Wipe Out game without futuristic hovering sounds and techno tracks is USELESS. Where is the juice?

In response to this. DICE is a great developer but they have Electronic Arts backing them up (unlimited money, sort of) and it’s going to be interesting now that EA is shifting from AAA to F2P or small scale games.

To me game audio is dependent from game development which is dependent from game business. Game audio is a mess because game development is a mess because game business is a mess. I needed to understand the balance of power and how ultimately this impact my field.

In order to focus on quality innovation and fun on games (which is pure R&D), you kind of need an unlimited supply of money and time which are very hard to obtain, as you know.

So if you try to fund your game from your previous games, you want them to make money, in a sustainable way if possible.

If it happens, then game development goes right and game audio is happening in the best setting possible which is the one you want, otherwise: project cancelled, called at the last minute, miserable audio budget… The list goes on.

Busimech

Business is crucial. What people need to understand is that the computer game business always has been complicated (that is, borderline unprofitable) because as Marc Cerny says in his talk the only constant in our field is change. These days game developers are all jumping in the AAA VS Indie/F2P wagon but it’s not a matter of who’s right, it’s a matter of what’s going on, how people use their digital devices and what is going on behind the scene. It’s the other end of our development/design spectrum.

For example, some people might think that the iPhone5 and iPad4 will continue to guarantee a stream of revenue on the iOS side, getting even bigger even. But you have to understand that:

• Carriers don’t want to be Apple’s bitch ever again. They are the ones paying iPhones full price, they are the ones selling data plans and trying to keep customers on their services. They don’t need to push people on data plans anymore.
• Of course competition is more than heating up, it’s coming from everywhere (MS, Amazon, Google) and carriers will use that leverage.

So on iOS the success window is going to be even more narrow. Which means cross-platform dev tools as much as possible (diversify your bonds, nigga).

Another example concerning game audio: F2P == retaining players from day one and as long as possible == BIG AUDIO AND SHIT. But if you’re a small team, you should probably not go the F2P road (you work two years with a friend, you’re broke as hell you don’t make a F2P game because it’s trendy, WTF?). At least in the West, in Asia it’s another story.

The hundreds of millions of handheld consoles sold is a thing of the past and because Nintendo/Sony still don’t match game development easiness and cheapness we have with mobile phones and tablets, I would not go this way (get away from exclusive deals, no game is going to make me buy a $250 game device anymore).

Business is complicated, it is crucial and everything is possible. If we want to be able to push on quality, innovation and fun and because it’s so tied up to development variables, we need to get business right and control it.

Excellent article on Pugs Luv Beats’ Theory of Fun and generative music. Basically Pure Data is my MIDI engine, the only difference is that I would less go on the playground’s road and aim more at a middle ground ala Sound Shapes (on a side note I don’t think platformers are great for heavy audio sync, the game flow is too noisy). If only we could have a game audio engine standard for that…

Also, building better tools for game design. My take on this was “the problem with Unity”. Again if we could get our “camera & microphone” standard to build games and I mean games, gameplay rules and feedback not worlds that would be great now that we have reached maximum asset output for 3D engines and humans…

This Gabe Newell interview is making the rounds these days. Because he said:

We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

So right, it’s FUD time because Gabe has a lot to lose with the Windows 8 store (also, Xbox Live integration). No one is pointing this out? In the interview he also says that touchscreen is a short term fad. I wish people would debate around this -it’s a big statement and very interesting- but no, people are focusing on Windows 8 being a catastrophe for Valve and everyone else.

Don’t you think it’s not that surprising to have digital distribution’s leader talking trash about upcoming competition? Don’t you think that Gabe could have started and invest Linux way before store competition forces him to do so? Don’t you think that knowing that Gabe is an ex-Microsoft employee who built his empire on top of Windows, you can take these declarations with a grain of salt?

Why am I in an industry that wishes new distribution channels to fail? Why wouldn’t you be interested in a new platform, touch more users, when making games is so hard and unpredictable as for the outcome’s success? I don’t get it. More options, what’s so bad about it? Unless they really screw us, there’s no need to wish them the worst when they are not even available yet. It just doesn’t seem professional at all.

Here’s the news: there is no perfect platform and there will be no perfect one. The only way for platforms to get better for developers is them competing to get us. We, developers need to push them to compete (by doing this p 58/66), this is how we can get leverage. Ouya is on its way to allow us to change the console area and that’s good. I don’t wish them to fail even if I see many obstacles on their road as well if not more than Microsoft’s Windows 8. They’re both shaking competition. That’s good for us. Apple disrupted our world, punched Nintendo/Sony’s handheld businesses. Now they’re sitting on their ass. Google didn’t change the market as deeply neither Amazon but whatever, let’s encourage players to play shall we? It’s Microsoft’s turn, no need to be a dick we need this competition. For example, it’s great that they included a trial mode in their marketplace for apps and games, a thing still missing in GooglApple ecosystems. That’s good for us. Let’s take advantage of this dynamic.

Platforms are gardens and we create seeds. No seeds, no garden. No garden, no people. Then, how creating seeds in an overcrowded walled garden where they will slowly die is better than creating seeds in a new, relatively more open environment where they can grow? And when your seed (game, IP) is strong enough port it in a crowded garden (I never thought Minecraft would come on Xbox AND be a massive hit on it).

At the end, you never know which one will succeed. So keep an eye on all of them and be honest about what they are/can do.

Ouch, comments.

So what would you do: release a game on PC, deal with multiple hardware but getting more money while being able to patch whenever you want for free or release a game on console, deal with one hardware, getting less money while paying to patch and release?

The answer always has been release on PC and keep the IP but as pointed out recently, developers don’t listen, don’t want to listen whatever. How many people saying “I don’t have a console but I have a computer and I’d gladly pay for this game please?”. I’m not the only one reading that all the time and it’s not new. When I read that “XBLA was THE place to be in 2008 because yay Braid” I’m like no, you wanted to think that but a lot was going on at that time and the iPhone was as much of a place to be as Steam and the PC were. Jon Blow himself wasn’t hiding the problems with XBLA so there’s no excuse, only choices.

But developers don’t give a fuck. Releasing a game on console is like the supreme achievement. Releasing a game that people love is, the platform’s coolness is so irrelevant to me. Phil stated it:

It’s made to be played with a controller, on a couch, on a Saturday morning. To me, that matters; that’s part of the medium.

So here’s the thing, you don’t tell me how to play your game. If I want to play it in my bed on a laptop this is none of your business and your game will not fucking change, dammit. Stop this nazi-signer you’re-holding-it-wrong Jobs like bullshit.

I would not be surprised if this corrupted saved game bug was easy to fix on PC if existing at all (the save system on consoles is a nightmare of complexity).

So remember young game developer: Release on PC and keep the IP.

Game development started in the 70s, when racism sexism and segregation were supposed to end, or at least they were discussed and people knew they were wrong. To summarize.

Because game development started with personal computers, only rich white people could afford them for their kids therefore game development quickly became a 110% white men. Now 10% of women. About 20% of Asians if not more. 1.5% or 2% of black people and Latinos in 2005, maybe less today. I mean the LGBT community and issues they have are bigger in the gaming internet world than racial diversity is, how is that? I’m not sure I’ve worked with more than 3 black people like me, lost in an ocean of machines and white guys over a decade doing game audio. Trust me it gets on your nerves at some point or at least, a lot of questions come in.

We are now a $65 billion a year industry where apparently in the biggest market that is the US, black people and Hispanics play and purchase more games than any other ethnic group.

You see how wrong all this is?

So post-WWII post-civil rights movement post-feminism generations are allowing the same racism and bigotry as before, only softer (maybe not so soft in multiplayer online games). The system is against minorities (expensive computers were, knowledge and networks are) and education doesn’t shift anything if people are too busy solving crazy game related problems to even think about including change in what they do, diversity is not their problem. They probably think social progress has been done and that it’s minorities’ fault if nothing changes. Game developers understand very well systems (or at least they should) but they are often introverted nerds who really, really appreciate their routines and the coziness of a stable world with no change. Like heroes of their games.

 
Imagine me saying to the 99% white team: “could we have something else than a white dude, just for a change you know? No? Hey come back!”.

Change is a process guys, not a destination nor a light switch. You need to change too. Everyone. Everyday.

Every year the GDC is almost crying for “more diversity, yay!” but the industry is hiring on compatible aesthetics, driven by publishers’ marketing schedule which means that a person like me is not really connecting with the overall white game culture (I’ll never be a Games of Throne D&D board games fan, I come from the play world of musical instruments, 8/16bits and PC games and skateboard sorry). They say designers should be curious and explore plenty of things, I’ve been used to diversity, all my life. It’s the “other side” who’s not despite knowing that they need people like me. It’s just weird.

Where are the black owned game studios oh snap, they don’t exist at all. 30 years in and it’s still not happening? You’d think Hollywood is crazy conservative but they are at least smart enough to understand where the money is how to provide for an audience. The game industry absolutely fails at that, even when the industry has some hints.

You know GTA San Andreas the game around black dudes and crime in California? Best selling game ever on PS2. Third best selling game of all time in 2010. Biggest success for a GTA game at 27.5 million copies, something that will probably never happen again (on a side note, gamers questions about which GTA game is the best always end up with racist slurs).

But I guess we can’t do “black-themed” games without crime in them, can we? *crickets*

Where I lose a bit of hope is that even on simple, not complex race-related things game developers fail at providing or nurturing openness and diversity. The pattern is simple: they assume something and/or you can go fuck yourself. Like considering that everybody is right-handed in a FPS (you’re laughing but aiming accuracy is much higher when the weapon is on the side of the aiming eye and yes, I’m a lefty) or thinking that maybe some people can’t use WASD correctly, game developers fail at being accessible, at opening up to people despite having a medium allowing us to make changes like we want, more than ever today. We don’t really take advantage of this malleability, which is not available for any other medium. What a shame to be so stiff.

Other simple change that doesn’t really happen: audio. We all know that the earlier in the process game audio is started, the better it influences and merges with the rest. It’s not even a game feature, it’s been known since Star Wars at least. And yet at the 2012 GDC the two keynotes on audio highlight that audio was -wait for it- started early in the process and helped make the games stand out (Bastion and Ravenwood Fair). Like it’s a discovery for computer game professionals, really? These games are going to be exceptions in a sea of games with bad audio? We don’t change. We painfully crawl without looking around. The GDC becomes Groundhog Day too often these days. We get stuck in loops of inactions.

Even with words we suck at change. Video game is a terrible term for our medium (it has this immature stigmata) I’ll say it over and over. What “video” means for teenagers today anyway? Nothing. But if in the industry you talk about computer games people think you’re overreacting.

I feel down watching a 1988 Chris Crawford talk because it’s still so relevant to us. 88, it shouldn’t be the case goddamn. How people can get butthurt with Raph Koster’s game grammar or don’t understand how AAA studios close one after another, I don’t know. It’s crystal clear to me. Some people explained very precisely how and why the current way games are produced is doomed if you don’t want to hear it, please don’t. But you should stop doing that if you care about computer games.

I mean if you don’t even care about business decisions and trends of your own fast-moving field, if you don’t try to think ahead of that, how can you think of integrating more minorities or even feel that the gamedev community needs to do something about that? At the end it’s not your problem, right? Wrong.

The game industry and culture are a small island shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, mostly because of the lack of openness and diversity (real diversity, not having black hookers in a “lol next gen” Sci-Fi game). It’s an interesting time with the big studios dissolution trend, small teams are back. Will they think of expanding horizons or will they stick even more to the same paradigm? Unfortunately I see the latter happening more often than not (it makes sense though, it’s a protective reflex to stick with people like you when you are in struggle).

The game industry smart people’s inability to actually provide and support change in a 30 year old industry born after huge social progress -the biggest ever- is deeply infuriating, pretty depressing. And I don’t know what to do. Except my own thing, I guess.

The relationship between music and videogames is not a rhetorical one, it’s not just an analogy– the language describing it may be, but the various identities are a fact. Structurally, there’s little the two forms don’t have in common. This has design implications– rhythmically, formally, texturally, etc. Most importantly, in practice, both music and games are played– and can be played in very similar ways.

Musical instruments are games, as are compositions. They are possibility spaces with boundaries implicitly or explicitly inviting certain types of play.

Amazing, amazing blog post.

And this is in essence, exactly what I feel and felt. I said earlier how I had so much fun playing music that I wasn’t playing computer games as much and felt guilty about it (if you make games, you’re supposed to spend your life on them when you’re not making games, right? Wrong).

So I always wondered, what is it that I don’t like with games? That I never do what they want me to do? Achieve goals. It’s been a constant that when I play, I tend to achieve obvious goals when there’s nothing else to do (fighting games) but as soon as I have freedom, I enjoy it. How many times did I even try to play shoot’em ups without firing a bullet, flowing through enemies waves? Oh man. When you think about it competition is good (or the best), when it’s not really perceived as a competition.

And, it’s true, competitions can reveal amazing seemingly endless vistas to our senses of possibility. This openness points toward the divine. Then– the feeling shuts off when we realize that the possibilities can be ranked by order of their usefulness. We will be more likely to succeed if we behave in certain ways. The problem here is that the conditions of success, and sometimes the methods for achieving success, are pre-determined by the game’s design. The game imposes a value system on our experience. The divine impulse can remain intact only if we’re always open to our inner sense of infinite possibility (which will mean entertaining the less "useful" possibilities).

Exactly what I feel when I record my bass: the game rules are that I need to play at at certain constant volume, be perfectly clean on every single note etc. Even if I still play the same as before, I might not feel the “divine impulse” because  of the “recording system” imposing itself. So it will be different and probably not as good. Which is why Miles Davis and so many others just recorded everything in the studio, forgetting about the game rules. Just play with this sense of infinite “possibility” (it’s the best description of this feeling I ever read) and have somebody listen to hours of hours of shit to get the gem, the gem that is the purest form of play.

It explains why sometimes by being invincible in a game you just become good enough that you wouldn’t need the invincibility, you know? Because now you can enter the game flow and perform well, without stressing out about hard rules like dying and starting over again.

What is wrong is the widely-held assumption that these kinds of barriers and motivators are essential to the form of games.

Exactly. For example, in Everyday Shooter you have 7 levels. If you fail at say level 3 you have to start over again at level 1. Why? Because the designer decided that it was this way, old school Japanese arcade style. Artificial barrier against my enjoyment. It’s not a matter of being “hardcore” or being “casual”, if play is everything at the same time. If I want to play level 4, I should. If I’m not good enough for it, let me try it. I do that all the time with music and this is how you progress and enjoy. I can start playing music casually on a slow blues and two hours later you can’t follow the number of notes I’m dropping on a 180bpm solo. That is play to me. Let me do my thing with your game.

Competitive structures have had, and will continue to have, many things to teach us (at best– about valued/loved play processes), but they lack a particular kind of realism that’s wanting in our games right now– playspaces that, as in life (though very differently), allow for the full flourishing of our creative faculties, the active exploration of shifting possibility spaces and the intimacy with the materials that form their boundaries.

*Bumps fist* On a side note, it makes me glad that my game prototype tries to dive in more into that matter. It’s good to see that what makes sense to me but makes me doubt, has some backup from a dude I don’t know but who explains it very well. At least, we’re two!

It’s mostly made to create universes, scenes, worlds. It’s not good at creating games.

Let me explain.

There are so many things made easier with Unity. You drag and drop assets, you drag and drop scripts and press play to immediately see what is going on. In 15 minutes you can create a room apply physics and move inside this world, according to the law of gravity, or not.

For that it’s pretty insane and an excellent tool.

For creating games that is, designing rules and applying them it’s pretty terrible. I mean all of sudden it’s not drag and drop or pre-fab or anything designer-friendly, it’s pure code.

Help. Halp.

It’s not that it’s too complicated, it’s just that it’s not designer-friendly. Look at how much information you get for stupid visual things that you really care about far, far into the development process. First, mechanics, core mechanics. I build a game.

All of sudden it make sense that everybody on YouTube is doing the same with this tool, creating 3D environments and eventually dropping some FPS style gameplay or third person whatever.

To me it’s almost like the Unity team should do it in reverse: make everything about gameplay with pre-made stuff (like setting a time limit, a score, simple behaviors and operators like they do for the input), a lot of documentation about how to make great controls and rules and much less about shaders et all. This stuff is complex and only experimented coders use them, it’s almost like they don’t need documentation, they know what they’re doing. Designers trying gameplay ideas? Not so much.

Designers can learn to code but it’s so damn slow! It’s so tedious, I think we know enough about games to pre-fab a lot more or make it more granular and fluid yet friendly when it comes to create mechanics. Game Maker is closer and yet lack other stuff.

 
The little mechanics engines of my game prototype, thanks Playmaker!

How is that visual programming is not more prevalent in game development? In this article they aim to build entire apps but it’s not a good way to look at it, parts of game development could definitely profit visual programming simply because there are more about design than code parts.

I definitely miss those not-really-existing-yet tools. It’s almost like we’re artificially supporting two different worlds, design and code, when they should merge to some extent and create something different. Let’s make it happen, people.