Category: Audio&Games

This is how you should always sell your game, first and foremost. On the Internet.

Perfect! Offspring Fling, makes me think about the unreleased Ookibloks.

People are so great. They know walled garden are a problem. They give in for short term bucks, massive wet dreams and the socially rewarding “I’m making a game for iOS/XBLA, you know the iPhone/360?”.

There is Steam, too. Users can’t shut the fuck up about how it’s great (it is great, for them and me.user) but developers shouldn’t rush for it. Sell your game on your own, too. Keep control over your content. And please users, stop demanding to have all your games in Steam. For creativity, freedom of speech and other matters, you’ll need to move your ass, launch a browser and install a file. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I don’t want that big fat ass middleman in the middle of our relationship. If you can’t take the fact that a great game will not appear in your Steam folder, you need to seek help.

Developers have stars in their eyes thinking about the success of World of Goo on the iPad, forget that as 2DBoy said it, they have been crazy lucky to have their game featured at the right time (just before Christmas). People forget that the initial release of World of Goo made 25% of its revenues directly from their website. They forget that it’s through this release that people like me bought it, played it, and confirmed to Wii users and everybody else that this game was good and worth some bucks.

So it has a great effect: you can release whenever you want with nobody making you wait for anything. I can’t count how many developers complain about this issue on consoles. Second, you get all the money and people building momentum for you (again, as long as the game is good of course).

I know it’s harder and in our idiotic society, it seems lame to have a Paypal account and a web site. You don’t reach people the same way that iTunes or Xbox Live’s virality does but come on you greedy bastard, if in 2008 when Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr and others were pretty much inexistent 2DBoy earned a quarter of their revenue with NO marketing through their website, I bet you can make a lot more today. Ask Humble Bundle. Yes, they use another weakness in humans, the sale/impulse buy mechanic. But again, you might not need to make $1M in ten days. On a side note, I still haven’t played the vast majority of the two bundles I bought.

So just to say, if you think Nintendo channels and App store tubes or whatever are mean and that you are not free I say, you have choice. You are free with the Internet (at least for now). Don’t try to make platforms understand you. They are here to fuck you, it’s the meta-game. Make them scared. Make them understand that you don’t need them like a crackhead needs crack. Stop sucking their dicks. Make them suck yours.

By making a game they want so bad.

The PC aka Windows PC is leading the technology market, as usual.

Look at the mini arcade stick on the left. It screams “play with me!”

In an interesting and quite unexpected move Q-Games, a company working closely with Nintendo and Sony, released its game PixelJunk Eden on Steam, the Windows PC client that rules them all (not really my opinion, but you have to read people’s comments, they LOVE Steam and want everything on it).

Only fairly old people like me see the change, with Capcom releasing his Street Fighter IV on consoles and Windows PC with just a few months of delay. It was years for Street Fighter II and the port was terrible. Street Fighter IV runs smoothly on netbooks. By the way they still sold 25+ millions of these mini laptops in 2011, pretty much on part with other devices that are “taking over”.

People can’t stop talking about the “next” thing, mobile or tablets. The PC market is so enormous, it just keeps growing. It is the blue ocean. Double Fine’s crazy Kickstarted project is scheduled for Windows PC first -and by the time I typed this, they have the money to do the ports-. The most interesting 2011 games are happening on Windows PC -The Witness, Spy party, Dear Esther-. The great, free Stealth Bastard is on Windows. Humble Bundle can thank Windows for making them so rich and successful (70% of their revenues on average).

The argument for PCs is not the up to ten times faster hardware (everything is fast enough today, even your microwave can run Crysis) it’s about the fact that you don’t have to deal with gatekeepers and just focus on the more than crucial part, building a good game.

This is common knowledge, there’s nothing new under the sun but I still have to write about it. Nobody wants to acknowledge that because it butthurts their brand whore-ish minds but it totally is the best, most stable scenario since a couple of years: prototype on Windows, release on Windows, get noticed, build a community, attract money and port. World of Goo. Aquaria. Osmos. Blizzard, Valve. Frozen Synapse, the list goes on. It’s the best for everybody. Freedom from the developer first aiming the biggest platform, reducing risks and then aiming for different experiences, smaller markets with other devices. For gamers everything is a la carte, no more I need to have this hardware to play this because everybody has a PC. Then if you really want to have the game on your PS Tada 3000 4G, ask for it or even finance it. You get to communicate with developers. The Double Fine experiment -crowd sourced adventure game design?- is interesting in this sense.

Weirdly despite being a gigantic hardware pool, The PC architecture is so old now that a shit ton of problems are solved, have been solved or can be circumvented. On mobile and tablets? Problems just keep popping out -screen size, supported or unsupported APIs, bots– and you usually have no fucking margin, thank you closed and tight ecosystem.

Which brings me to another blog post.

Like a shitload of creative work.

Three usually praised games that always make me want to say “Come on, son”.

– Another World

Killing slugs with my feet and learning by heart how the fuck they fall from the ceiling. So immersive.

I met Eric Chahi and love the man but no, I don’t like this game. Controls are awful, there’s no flow, you just die over and over. The at that time insanely impressive intro is a nerd fantasy -holoscreen fap fap fap- as is the end -dragon, fap fap fap- and although I applause the technical and artistic quality of Another World -trust me, I had the VHS of Micro Kids watched over and over-, I don’t think it should be venerated like it is because it’s just not that great of a game. I was very disappointed when I played it, so pumped by the famous intro. It’s one of the first milestone of a movie-like focused game industry, born from the envy to be considered as art, sorry Art. By copying film features instead of pushing gameplay, game design and its own marvels.

– Mortal Kombat

No comment

Lord. I’ve never been able to get over these lifeless, lazy designed, clown-looking characters. Even now it still makes me cringe the shit out of me. The most retarded way to block an opponent in a fighting game. The sound, oh my fucking god. The whole concept of Babalities is just… It’s beyond my understanding how lame and douche-y this game was and worse, massively successful (11 games?). I was 12 when the first game came out and it just never came close to the appeal of the amazing Street Fighter II and Streets of Rage I was playing at that time. But after playing these a lot, well… It’s the game that definitely told me that Americans can possibly have the worst taste ever. Super Mario Bros the movie was right at the corner, validating my thoughts.

– Metal Gear Solid

!

I can’t. I appreciate the character design, crazy ass robot shit and breaking the 4th wall, but I’m bored to death with stories and restricted freedom. People forget that the appeal of the first version on PS1 was that it was such an insane gap for console gamers after the Genesis/SNES era. A complex, full real time 3D stealth adventure game? That was more than crazy. I grew up mostly being free in games with flight simulators, Doom and stuff so it didn’t hit me as much. Watching MGS 4 is so painful -80s gameplay with ultra realistic shadows and PS2-like mazes-, I understand why Uncharted felt so fresh and fluid when it came out months before. So kudos for the tech, aesthetics and re-launch of a franchise. But the game/gameplay/experience? I can’t.

Comment I could have written, almost:

Anyone working in the AAA industry on any level who thinks Demon Souls / Dark Souls are examples to be followed or praised should have their head examined. Honestly, wake the f**k up. If you’d like to set the progress core gaming has made as a form of primary mainstream entertainment back 20 years, make more abominations like Demon Souls and Dark Souls and market them to the core audience.
Let’s drop the pretense that Demon Souls / Dark Souls are games designed to challenge, because they are not. They are gamified masochism simulators designed to appeal to the .01 percent of the people in the world with Self-Defeating Personality Disorders a.k.a. masochistic personality disorder. Which shouldn’t surprise or shock anyone since Kei Hirono, the producer of Dark Souls freely admits the games are masochistic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cctSOnxkmc&feature=related
I mean, my god… what the hell is going on within the industry? Stop pandering to less than 1 percent of the audience and stop throwing flowers at the feet of a development team the entire industry and the gaming press should condemn.
And Margaret Robertson, no joke… if you’re not already, get yourself into therapy before you hurt yourself or someone else.

The game industry is fascinated by Japan’s game culture where the craziness of spending dozens, hundreds of hours on a game designed to make you his bitch is part of the appeal. Because you feel good after ruining three gamepads in front of your TV, alone. Pleasure is a lot about bragging about what you did in the game rather than what you actually did, repeating over and over and over some actions. Navigating awful, disgustingly unpractical menus and sub-menus. Hundreds, thousands of times.

First, I think it’s lazy design. Fine tuning difficulty means touching a lot of stuff -level design, mechanics, UI usability- and it’s complicated to do that. It’s re-designing, basically. It’s easier to stick to a design and just move variables up and down. Japanese game development is known to be extremely rigid and probably pushed game developers to continue the tradition. After all, one of the goal of making a computer game is to get people to play it over and over.

People get hooked on difficulty or infinite grind. Of course, when you spend four hours trying to beat a boss and that you finally do it, you’re happy. You know, you die and then you find the weakness and then you beat it and then the boss has a second phase and you die and you learn the weakness of the second phase and then you have to perfectly do the phase 1 and 2 etc. I fucking hate this shit. Maybe I’m too much of a designer but I “read” their intentions as “let’s artificially bump up the time you spend on this game”. Even the “boss” concept is lame at that point in the history of computer games.

Let me be clear, I think it’s pretty cool when you are a kid. You learn what failure and commitment are and I think computer games are really good at that. You just restart by pushing a button. But as an adult? Fuck that, I want to entertain myself, not get desperate and cry angrily.

When I play, I want to enjoy the experience, it’s the core of it. I like challenges and get better, no problem. Get stuck by incredibly masochist design decisions? Fuck you. I’m playing a game. It’s not supposed to bring me stress. Adults swim in stress in their lives, why the hell would they want more of it?

Stress induced games are fine, as long as they are… Multiplayer. The game I played the most in my life is probably Counter-Strike and it’s hard and stressful, you die a lot. But there’s this psychological powerful thing that you can reverse that. You can die in the first seconds as you can kill the five opponents by yourself, with a lot of luck. All these RPGs, third-person brawl single games force me to do something a certain way and penalize me for every single other way. That sucks. It’s a fascist approach. There, I said it.

What’s interesting is how the game industry polarizes and embraces insane difficulty on one side (Dark Souls), super dull challenge on the other side (Uncharted 3) and the middle ground, a mix of both in a sandbox (Skyrim). It shows how much easier it is to polish a design for one single group of people, hardcore or softy rather than design a large spectrum of challenges. I guess you have to listen to your fans, too. But as games grow more and more as services, they need to expand their audience and developers need to be more flexible about their designs. WoW is still a king in this respect. Mixing a couple with one playing hardcore and the other casual in the same game and in the same room, is a huge achievement.

Did I mention that making games is hard?

I think we need more design-ders. Or code-signers. Whatevs.

The argument against it is that a lot of successful game designers don’t code at all and that it’s going to give something else as a result in games compared to the classic designers/coders team.

How is that not great? We need that. I wish I could like Jon Blow, Chris Hecker or Eskil code my ideas, right here. I’m trying, copying and pasting code, battling with assemblies in Unity and it’s awful and it’s barely the start. Ew.

For some reason, having a coder doing exactly what you want or sharing the same aesthetics, or making him work on what you need right now is not as easy as it sounds. Plus, doing a game is hard so you need a really strong relationship with him on top of that. That’s the reason we see more and more successful coder/designer teams being siblings, couples or friends from kindergarten. I wrote about it two years ago and in my case, it’s not easy to get someone to work on my concept and maybe because I’m a crazy control freak or so ferociously independent, I want to do it myself or understand as much as I can how it works.

So, good for Ueda san or Miyamoto to have a team of people dedicated and paid to please them and I wish I could have the same, but I don’t! And a lot of game designers don’t either.

The problem is, transferring ideas and mechanics into working code in the same brain, hurts. A lot. But it’s doable and as tools are making it easier and easier, more and more people will do it, just to go faster, spend less or stay truer to the original, designer vision, all of them being really good reasons. It sure will bring new challenges and its own share of conservatism, but I think that the business side of games is calling for people like that right now. People who can sustain a vision, thanks to having a precise design/build view. It’s still so rare!

This breed of game developers needs to get bigger, as we are stagnating so much in our little worlds. We can’t afford to be conservative in this area, as we are in others (fuck you WASD, fuck you; please no more pixel art chiptune, pleaaase).

Examples:

Soul Bubbles on the left, Spirits on the right.

Same kind of universe, theme, mechanic around wind, both very well crafted by small teams. Soul Bubbles is anterior, being out on the DS in 2008. Spirit was out on the iPad November, 2010. Soul Bubbles HD will be out soon on it too.

It’s interesting because according to the team’s blog the idea behind Spirits was to do a Lemmings-like game. Soul Bubbles comes from a programmer and a designer doodling with a custom 2D physics engine and developing a game around it. One is a copy/paste with a twist, the other is a unique, fresh game. And that’s why it’s a better game, with a 10 pages thread of dedicated fans on Neogaf and unanimous critics.

Other case:

Radical Fishing on the left, Ninja Fishing on the right.

Here we have a blatant copy/paste with Radical Fishing being the first out, for free and being remade for Apple devices in order to cash in on develop’s work. Too bad, Ninja Fishing is out on this platform, “stealing” all the money.

What strikes me here is that it shows how games are all about mechanics and that tacky, not hip visuals are good enough, if you want to make a fun game and make money. Which is an important part in crafting, too.

So Daniel as often, is butthurting the industry. I agree with him because I’m kind of a romantic I guess. But I also don’t agree in the way that well, there’s no moral in business.

But Daniel has a point. Just in terms of settings and themes, I’m not even entering the world of game design. Just in these terms, you know we are lazy as fuck: heroic fantasy, Indiana Jones stuff, sci-fi and war, war, war. Don’t tell me that it’s what’s work, it’s a really bad argument, as Daniel points out:

We look at our current derivative behavior, acknowledge that it is harmful and then proceed to dogmatically justify its continued pursuit based off economic, legal, historical and short-term selfish reasons.

We just stay in our comfort zone over and over, game writers and reviewers included. Guys working on all these 3, 4, 5, 12 iterations of games love what they do, game writers can pull out tons of stuff about legacies and articles about series over and over and love that, nobody wants to change anything. And there’s a public for these games, end of the story. And end of the medium too.

A lot of people in the industry know this. The excellent Tale of Tales interview shows in the comments that it inspires people. Whatever you say, we need innovation and new games.

So if we go further and search for different game design ideas and mechanics and synthetize them, there’s a lot to do. How about the crazy sniper feature (100X zoom!) of MDK, mixed in a first person view AAA game about photography in a Laputa world? Ideas of games are so cheap, I’m surprised people don’t search a bit more. A Lot of projects get rejected in AAA studios because of risks involved in making them, I’m sure a lot of them are original and disregarded to death. Sigh.

What’s kind of depressing is that I get that 300 people in a game studio are going to do what they’re told to, but indies? VVVVV’s clone with a twist, really? If you’re doing something indie, you’re not making a living building polished iterations of a successful franchise, so why trying to copy so much? Why blatantly steal? What is up with this scummy mentality growing up with app stores? Geez.

Incestuous industry is incestuous. The amount of nostalgia through game writing and game developers on Twitter, is sickening. Nostalgia is bad for change. It feels like the game culture is all about celebrating the past and being really happy or really mad about the last iteration of [enter your game of choice here].

For a medium where we can do whatever the fuck we want, it’s disappointing. Again (I know, I repeat myself).

Saints Row: The Third.

Yes, this game is offensive. Yes, it is absolutely weird and doesn’t make any sense.

Yes, this games has bad taste, childish humor, is sexist and everything. But it’s also a very well crafted sandbox game with a shit-ton of content to play with. Freedom in games is something very valuable and pretty rare (see Skyrim fanboys or see rollercoasters like MW3 or Rage).

In three iterations, developers have been smart enough to stop trying to make a highly customizable GTA clone and simply go for what people were doing with an open, urban world: messing with it.

It also feels really good to me as an old fart because that’s what games during the 8/16bits era were about; weird stuff, weird settings and themes that don’t matter as long as you have fun. The over dramatic tone and false maturity brought by a lot of games these past few years? Fuck that. I was watching Uncharted 3 and the last Batman, holy shit it’s so boring and pretentious and yet, doesn’t deliver much.

So honest AAA developers focusing on interaction, freedom, fun, listening to players feedback and bringing a big dose of WTF and chaos on the table, I say “yes, please”.

http://kotaku.com/5730637/ aka, The Year I Gained The Courage To Ignore Video Game Music.

Two things: multitasking and dullness of games today. One feeds the other and vice versa.

We don’t multitask. We simply don’t. True, we can process music in the background and we definitely can listen to something else than the in-game music. Today’s games’ dullness allow us to do something else meanwhile but games requiring more input, more thoughts, need our complete attention. Then, you pause it and check Twitter or kick the dog.

Also, game designers know about this bad trend of doing multiple micro tasks at the same time. “Yeah, this phase can be annoying and useless but after the wow effect being gone, the player will probably be all over his smartphone or taking a crap so whatevs man; plus it looks like a cool screen saver”.  One feeds the other.

Daniel Cook has an interesting take on game audio:

I play most games with the sound off. The fact that I’m missing the ‘best experience’ means little to me. Such a claim is a red herring goal promoted by the immersion nerds, but isn’t a meaningful goal for most players. First and foremost, I need a game that fits into my life. Music, 9 times out of 10 is a distraction due to how I play games. It is a distraction for most people playing games on phones. It is a distraction playing games on the computer. It is a distraction if there are other people in the room. It is only not a distraction for the small portion of the population who has isolated themselves in man caves. For the anti-social man cave dwellers: Enjoy your game music. I put the option in there just for you.
Disrespecting the developers is also a BS argument. A game is an entertainment tool that I will use as I desire. And when a designer choice hurts the tool’s utility, I will either use it in a different way or move onto something else that doesn’t have an unfortunately design flaw like relying on music to create the main experience of play.
The best games happen in my head and that really requires no external soundtrack.

It’s funny because Spryfox, his company just launched Triple Town on Facebook. I tried it and there wasn’t any sound at first. Absolutely tasteless feel to me. Somehow, they quickly managed to put some sound fxs and ambient noise, and it’s so much more addicting this way. I suspect players asking for audio feedback. Otherwise it’s just sad, just about numbers and game mechanics for which of course, you don’t need audio (or angry bears). But only a game designer like Daniel can appreciate that.

Steambirds from Andy Moore, had a surprisingly low amount of people muting sound, 11% on Steambirds Survival and only 6% on the original, which had at first a mere 1.3% of players hitting the mute button. I suspect the rate going up because of the same players playing new versions of the game and knowing the music already. Still, 11% is much less than what I thought.

People expect sounds in computer games because it’s always been this way, almost. Even more for younger generations.

Sound and controls ARE the feel. They are triggered and processed by your brain before visuals. Visuals are the conclusion of the first ones. For instance in SFIV, you think about a move and hear if it hit, missed or has been blocked before looking at it. You actually don’t really care about the visual feedback and don’t have the time to process it at this point, you think moves and you listen to if they worked or not. You don’t even think that you are listening! Except when you play without the sound and that your response time gets much slower. Also,  you carefully get a sense of the health bar red/yellow ratio when you hear a big SMASH, not how Ken’s kimono moves. Seriously, playing SFIV without hearing fists impacts -and only real world arcade stick clickety clicks- doesn’t even make sense to me.

Sound triggers action faster than visuals, because of the way these organs are connected to our brain. We survived on this planet for so long, thanks to our ears, not our stupid blurry diurnal vision. Sound is a really low level access to the brain. No sweet and easy API like visuals, but access to the raw power of emotions that you can’t get with anything else, but sound.

So for most multi-player and competitive computer games, sound is very much needed.

For single games, it depends largely on what the game is about so the sound fxs or music or both are important or adding something. Even on casual single player games on Facebook, people want, appreciate something for their ears.

Sound is a really weird asset and a difficult beast to drive. But you’d be a fool to not take care of it in your computer game development plan.

– The programmer situation

Let’s face it, programmers don’t really like sound, except at high volume in their headphones with some coffee on the desk. Two profiles I met in ten years: the dude who’s making a custom audio engine and the dude who’s implementing the content and who doesn’t really give a shit about sound features. They usually implement everything else too, sound is just one.

With these profiles, game audio ended up with libs doing everything for the programmer integrating content or on the other side, we focused on stuff like 3D audio for programmers who love math. It could be fine, I mean it’s fine in some ways. But it is so not enough.

– The designer situation

I stumbled upon this Gamasutra article about the 2012 GDC game audio track. It says a lot about the state of game audio and shows how most composers just don’t want to put their hands in the dirt and challenges of game design and game audio.

How important is it to be a "game-only" musician or sound architect in today’s industry, or is the market increasingly cross-platform across TV, film, etcetera?
Kenneth Young: I don’t think it’s ever been important to be "game-only," but I do think it’s very important to understand the challenges that games and interactivity pose. To that end, because the general complexity and sophistication of games is increasing, you’d think the market would favor those people with experience. And yet there is a trend for film composers with zero games experience to score AAA games…

So… It’s not important but games are getting more and more sophisticated and so you would need less and less game audio experience? It doesn’t make sense. It is important to be “game-only”, it’s just not trendy. That’s what is happening. Composers don’t want to wear that nerdy hat, and game directors fantasize on their favorite music scores. Nonetheless, there are a lot of games outside the AAA thing which would benefit the experience of a game-only-or-pretty-much composer. Also, understanding game development takes a while, it’s not just a matter of knowing what audio engine to use, it goes deeper and there’s no limit to that. That’s where we don’t dig enough, that’s where I want to go.

I’d love to see a guy like John Williams do an original score for a video game, but he would need a seasoned audio pro from the game industry to put it all together, get it interactive, and make it the best it could be.

Well then, John Williams’ music is barely samples that I would assemble to create game audio. If I deconstruct music and reconstruct it to match a game, mechanics and flow, who’s the main audio artist/craftman/designer? It’s me. Assets then just don’t matter that much, it’s all about execution, implementation. For a game, you much more need the audio guy who understands how games work than the one who sold millions of CDs. Because the latter will never get it while the first can improve his composition skills.

Like pretty much all the 80s-90s Japanese composers who are like gods today, they started from very little experience on their composing skills, and got better with time and projects. Koji Kondo didn’t even have a demo tape!

Another social economy thingy: a composer who has dreams is going to try to stand out much more than a composer who already had all the freaking awards in the world. It’s about freshness.

But this is the best part of this interview:

What do you think are some unexplored avenues for games that rely heavily on music or sound?
Brian Schmidt: There are definitely unexplored — or lightly explored — areas of game sound. For example, tightly coupling audio with physics, direct synthesis — the physical modeling of sounds. We keep hearing that the power of these new consoles may lead to a re-birth of the MIDI synthesized score, perhaps with instrument-based controllers as input devices to obtain more performance nuance than is possible with keyboard input. And to this date, by far — by literally an order of magnitude — the most attended talk at GDC by a game composer has been Koji Kondo, who does MIDI generated music for his games — he believes it essential to the aesthetic.

Direct synthesis and procedural music or FXs don’t let you have a good control and always sound kind of the same. And Koji is absolutely right. MIDI generated music allows full interactivity, what argument do you need after this? Koji has the most recognizable music themes in the world, maybe ever, he does MIDI synthesized scores and you don’t want to believe him? It’s not just the music he makes, it’s the tight integration with the gameplay, the aesthetic of the game, the all thing makes his music a much bigger, better thing than just notes following each other. This magic doesn’t happen otherwise. Grim Fandango is the exact same thing, it’s not just about the fact that it’s good jazz music you never hear in games, it’s the beautiful iMuse system that makes it such a seeming less experience with the rest of the game, mechanics and visuals all working together.

It’s beautiful. This is why the entire audio system (assets, tool chain, engine) needs to be tight. And for that we need flexibility, we need to reduce friction with annoying heavy wav files, we need to be able to iterate fast and find cool stuff and tricks. We need MIDI.

But even the more global music world has a weird hate/love relationship with MIDI. I mean, every single artists out there from Radiohead to Bieber, use some. All of the audio softwares out there work with MIDI or are heavily based on it. MIDI is 30 years old.

And yet we still don’t have built-in MIDI in guitars for example (I mean at an affordable, decent price) and it’s not really about anything but the old “MIDI is not real music or it’s like cheating!” mantra. It’s like people saying .svg is not graphic because .tga is. Seriously, it’s that dumb. Feel my despair. People love to segregate, it’s a human social disease, seriously.

But back to the game audio world. No MIDI engine except super expensive MILES Audio and in-house engines, like at Nintendo.

OS are a mess. Linux audio is a mess, so is Windows. But both can/could have a built-in MIDI engine with low latency, no doubt.

Even worse, the web and Facebook. We are getting backward there. Flash is horrible for some stuff but for audio, it’s just unbelievably bad. You can’t do nothing but play/stop/mute/fade. HTML5? Same shit plus ridiculous problems with codecs and files, inconsistency through browsers… And the brand new web audio API from Google just does the same stuff over and over again:

Spatialized audio supporting a wide range of 3D games and immersive environments:

• Panning models: equal-power, HRTF, sound-field, pass-through
• Distance Attenuation
• Sound Cones
• Obstruction / Occlusion
• Doppler Shift
• Source / Listener based

A convolution engine for a wide range of linear effects, especially very high-quality room effects. Here are some examples of possible effects:

• Small / large room
• Cathedral
• Concert hall
• Cave
• Tunnel
• Hallway
• Forest
• Amphitheater
• Sound of a distant room through a doorway
• Extreme filters
• Strange backwards effects
• Extreme comb filter effects

Dynamics compression for overall control and sweetening of the mix

Efficient real-time time-domain and frequency analysis / music visualizer support

Efficient biquad filters for lowpass, highpass, and other common filters.

A Waveshaping effect for distortion and other non-linear effects

Note the “Extreme filters”. God. Hi, programmers who sure will love to challenge themselves with these! But as a designer, I don’t give a damn about 3D -we’re playing in a browser on a laptop, not on a 5.1 setup with a 50 inches TV- and a convolution engine, previously known as reverb? Meh. Of course with all this, you could make your own limited web MIDI engine but… Sigh.

We don’t need dynamic real time mixing. We need dynamic real time composing and we are very short on tools to do that.

Somebody give me a high performance Fmod-like engine for FXs, a DirectMusic-like engine for music, wrap it all in a nice interface that can output for any platform and game audio designers will rise, as your game will sound and feel like nothing before. Actually, Fmod only needs a softsynth layer like Fluidsynth or TiMidity++ and more complex MIDI bindings but otherwise, it already plays .mid.

Fuck. It’s so messed up.

If you are a programmer and love to build tools, hit me the fuck up so that we can start something about all that and get famous or rich, or both.

We need a MIDI engine I

We need a MIDI engine II

It seemed great in 2004-2005 when I was looking at Nexon’s business model. Now I’m totally not sure about the gain. It even might be bad for long term business.

Everybody focus on one thing: OMG users spending money with in-app transactions are spending a lot, an average of 14$ according to some studies this year. Also, the traction of freemium business model is big and growing fast. People love free products? No shit.

I have two problems with that: how many people are actually paying, what is the ratio download free game/ buy stuff in it?

Flurry has the answer:

Flurry data shows that the number of people who spend money in a free game ranges from 0.5% to 6% depending on the quality of the game and its core mechanics.

I mean, 94% to 99.5% of people don’t spend anything? This is unsustainable, period. Considering the amount of work to make a quality game, this is madness. Making games is not like an exact science so as a developer, you need financing as fast and as much as possible and with rates like that, it’s suicidal. Of course it could change but when people are used to something free or almost free, they usually don’t like paying, or paying more. See the $0.99 “default” mobile app price that killed so many developers.

Moreover, I think people are paying right now because it’s still new. But the more they will have bad experiences (and it will happen), the less they will trust the freemium thing.

So basically you are dependent on a really, really small part of your entire customer base. If they leave or stop buying things, revenue hits the ground faster than a punk in Streets of Rage ( btw did you play the remake? It’s fantastic).

Also, it creates an abusive relationship with the whale-customer, as you want him to continue to buy stuff. Milking him. Using everything you can to retain him or abuse his network, email etc. That totally sucks and you don’t have choice if you want this model to work, you need to do that and do it well. That’s the thing.

Making a good game is very difficult. I totally understand that customers want to try before paying. But if he/she likes it, I don’t see anything wrong asking some money for that. Geez, everything out there in the world works like that and you usually don’t even get a free sample. This all F2P vortex is not balanced. Financing needs to be done by customers and not investors who will want some return -you know what I’m sayin’- out of that.

I do believe that the shareware, Steam or Minecraft models are pretty much perfect. Torchlight. I don’t like this kind of universe but I knew it was a good game. I downloaded the demo. Got hooked immediately, paid the full game and spent 30 hours on it. The developer got his money right away and even if I could have spent the 15 bucks with in-game transactions, maybe I would have been a cheap ass and totally tried not to buy anything. Maybe I would have disliked the game because it would have been designed so that I grind more until I have no choice but buy armors and +30 swords with real dinero.

If you charge the game and then charge for items or services, you screw people up. Where does it end then? Will I have to pay to just log in soon?

That’s a scammy mindset. I don’t like that. I want to instill respect and a nurturing environment where the developer can live out of his work and customers are happy.

Is that wrong?

Dreams of huge customer base, IPOs, selling to Google or any business plan based on short-sighted terms and big exits are just not compatible with computer games and how we make them. Because it’s all about crafting.