Category: Audio&Games

Go go go! will always be downsampled in my mind.

I miss playing this game. Sometimes a lot. It’s been one of the funniest game I have ever played with Bomberman and Mario Kart of course.

It’s not about killing. It’s all about situations. It’s all about player stories. Collaborative gameplay, in the best immersion setting you can have: First-Person-View.

When people say that these games are all conveying violence. Of course there are bullets, headshots, blood (I would have put less of this one in TF2) but looking at these games from that point of view is wrong because you can judge any game with moral and none are made with that in mind. Otherwise, what the hell means a plumber eating mushrooms and getting stronger with it while jumping like crazy? A subliminal go-get-some-drugs message that’s right. Or not.

At the last Indiecade there was a panel around FPV games, encouraging wacky concepts. The only concept I have for a FPV game is something like that:

AV-98 Ingram

I don’t want a human scale anymore, neither a little one. I want to be a GIANT. And not in a realistic slow painful way like MechWarrior, but in a way where I can move as fast as a human would, but in a robot of 12 meters for example.

So of course you would run in streets and manage to avoid cars, trucks and not to destroy everything in the city.

I would set a police procedural background (and other secret stuff) where you have to team with pals to arrest crazy robots like in the Patlabor serie. I loved how it describes the boredom of a little team of people sent to fix stuffs in the city. It’s really different from the simple plot of conflicts and wars you have in the Battletech world. Here, it would just be driving a robot, team up with friends and being careful to the city while wondering what the government or the army are up to.

You would be severely punished if not being careful, or rewarded if the mission was worth the damages (tough gameplay balance to set up!). You would be downgraded in the leaderboard if doing a mission would kill citizens and or making the city look like a battle field.

Of course it would be a MMO with destructable environments. Like in CS, I would emphasize action or combats on ressource scarcity, pushing people to work together. Want to capture this crazy robots? Make a plan because it’s not gonna happen by bunny jumping and railgunning the sucker.

The main problem of FPV games now is that you’re not responsible at all. They all have this “survive, whatever is happening” design. L4D makes it legitimate with zombies. TF2 makes it legitimate with a cartoon-ish style sending the message that “it’s all for fun don’t worry”.

I know, this PatlaborMMO is not very wacky, but I really have hard times to believe in really weird stuff with this immersive setup that is the FPV. Throwing kisses to others? Mmmh, no. A gun that create things? It works with 2D even in non- fast paced action game (Sprout Gun from Grim Fandango) but in FPV? Too weird..

Sometimes I really feel that we can’t go crazy producing games in some specific technical settings.

Still, we need to keep searching.

Suda51 was saying in a Gamasutra interview that his company was like a “video game band” with four members: script writing division, programming division, graphic art division and sound division”. All equal. Fab Four.

I’d like to dig that a little more.

Ok they’re only three. But you need confidence doing that don’t you?

If we look at the music history, we can see that the more people from a band know each other for a long time, the better it is for the formation to go further, to break through, to be successful whatever you put in on this last term.

What people knowing each other for a long time means? It means we’re talking about close friends or family. From the buddy in high school to the brother.

Rage Against the Machine child hood friend bassist of the vocalist. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger classmates in the early 50s. Freddie Mercury classmate with the first bassist and co-founder of Brian May’s band called Smile and renamed Queen.

Do you know a band that placed at least a single in the charts for five or more decades (50 years people!)? Besides The Rolling Stones, I know one. the band’s name is The Isley Brothers.

You get the idea.

It makes sense. I may be wrong but creating computer games and creating music are astonishly similar with this mix of absolute and total freedom when beginning to the extremely complex and subtual balance you need to achieve at the end of the production which if not obtained, can ruin everything. In graphic creation –from paint to movies- you have so much opportunities to mask hide or enhance. It’s all about illusion. Sound and games are more realistic in this creative sense.

To make it possible you have two choices: do it alone. Or do it with people you really can go with. It’s of course easier when it’s friends you know very well ie when you are all in a hard and stressful position and that you still don’t want to punch or stab them. I mean, for real :)

That’s why the indie game scene is full of little teams. That’s why AAA games get better when the core team is the same from an iteration to another. That’s why they fail when the team is not anymore (and with all the layoffs these last months, fear).

Look at the success of Zeno Clash, a game from a little team from Chile. I was really curious to see who they are because a large 3D world with a story, new gameplay and unique aesthetics is a FUCKING achievement for a team of four people. Four people, three brothers.

I’m not that surprised.

It scares me. I feel like I don’t have a band and never really did. As time passes by, it seems more and more out of touch.. I just tried to make me better at doing audio and games. I have a mental barrier for coding. But I should do it.

Then I would be like Prince.

Also if we want to mark our time with our medium, we need more friendship of xx years relying on the same visions or even family members into games in dev teams and less 3 months contracts, less ephemeral collaborations.

It is not happening at a big scale yet. The computer game creative-wise is kind of stagnating.

Maybe it’s unrelated.

The term audio-visual (AV) may refer to works with both a sound and a visual component.

It’s not too much about budgets or game developers not going for great audio and sound, they do from Indie to AAA.

It’s more about the fact that dev people usually separate these two components. Which are totally the same: they need to match perfectly and in the best case, they enhance each other. For that you need to make them work together, all the time, the sooner the better.

But in a lot of case the producer just doesn’t see it that way, graphic first, sound later.

The only thing in common that games have with movies is that they both have a sound and a visual component. In movies, it’s been a while that sound is made at the same time that the visuals or even before: the lightsaber sound –yeah I always use the same example because it just works- has been made with notes, the script of the movie and roughs of the ultimate Jedi weapon. Not after shooting, not during, not on post-production, BEFORE all of that. Pretty sure it gave George Lucas some visual ideas.

See what I mean?

These movies from the 70s indies directors –Scorsese, de Palma, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg- all share that: sound and visual are matching like crazy. Or not matching but playing together. I watched E.T. recently and the sound of men’s keys in the wood is brilliant, conveying this awful feeling of being locked or trapped. The high-pitched keys sound suggests oppression, jail. And there’s so much more interaction between audio and visual in this movie (and all the work of these directors).

Think about it. Emphasis on the sound part more than on the visual part of keys. Why? Because keys are not sexy and a close-up of them would be ridiculous. Pushy even.

That’s exactly what we do in games. We put too much effort on the visual to the point where it becomes ridiculous in a lot of ways: 3D graphic team sizes, outstanding visuals with generic audio (SF IV with sounds from sound banks everyone can buy), visual effects pornography (blur that shit, make the GPU sweat with useless particles just “because we can”) etc..

Everything is visual and if it’s the case, it doesn’t appeal the same way that if it’s audiovisual. More than trying to tell stories, it’s this delicate recipe of mixing two powerful components that we should go for in the game industry when we are looking at movies or tv.

Sound is easily forgettable –I didn’t remember the keys sound but watching it reminded me about it a lot- though. In the game industry we do think in months. A triple A game is making all its money in a matter of weeks. We globally don’t think our games as timeless creations.

Those who do that, success: Valve, Grim Fandango’s music and visual style, Everyday Shooter.. Damn, this game make me have tears sometimes. It’s a friggin’ shooter but the interaction and perfect match on the audiovisual part goes in places in my mind, in my heart that a little few games did go. It’s just overall a so much better experience, dare I say an unforgettable one.

We are building experiences. And we all have ears. Think about it when building the A/V content  around your gameplay.

Yes I want it. I want a way to go through games without having to fail miserably 50 times and giving up, thanks Rock Paper Shotgun to talk about it.

It’s a thing of the past now. Please.

Because to appreciate a game you need to play it. If a level is boring and you stop because it’s hard –or badly designed- so you miss an awesome experience next level, it’s really a loss for the player, for the game culture. I skipped countless boring chapters reading books, or skipping songs on a album. It’s easy. In games it’s never easy to do so.

Because hardcore gamers who actually do it over and over until the end would be proudly seen as people with balls and determination instead of being seen as dorky nolife gamers.

Because I hate the fact that if I passed three-third of the level, I have to restart over. Yeah I got it, merit and blabla but it’s a damn game people. Game developers were doing that in the 80s/90s because of hardware restrictions. Now, let me pause and save my game wherever I want. Whatever the game is. I demand freedom on my play sessions.

Because I’m a fucking adult and life is sufficiently hard. That doesn’t mean I want to play Peggle everyday. That means I don’t want your batshit crazy rules that make me fail all the time because the designer decided so. I don’t want something dull either.

Because I want to enjoy my games and if I pass this level, I don’t want to start it over everytime I launch my game.

Because I don’t have time for that. I have time to enjoy, I don’t have time to feel frustrated.

Because I would actually finish games, feel good and buy some more. What game developer doesn’t want that widely? A lot apparently.

I have to say it: I hate 3D third person view.

Hours of play like that… Mmmh, maybe not. 

That makes 90% of AAA titles sort of meh for me.

From a player point of view I hate it because having your character stabbed in the back while you can’t see shit just sucks so much. Alone in the Dark was the first to fully demonstrate that.

Of course a lot of progress has been done since then going from static cameras to dynamic ones but still, it’s always that Third Person View (TPV) that makes some situation totally unfair and not fun at all.

Also as Kotaku was writing a few days ago, it’s really boring to have the back of your character for hours. That’s what you are going to see the most. His/her ass/back. You couldn’t see why there was a lot of bikini-style female characters starting with Lara’s 70s indy-ish shorts? Well now you know.

Hours of work.. Hours of watching pr0n too I guess

Also, that’s why there is a lot of cinematics in these games, so you don’t have this “corridor” view all the time. Problem is, cinematics are no games.

Now from a developer point of view, 3D camera is a bitch. Almost nobody got it right, except Nintendo. 3D camera is an insane mind fuck to code, shape and make it perfect in every kind of situation, everywhere in the game, without creating bugs. Of course there’s no generic way to do it well, it depends entirely on what your game is about. You definitely can say that this is a massive problem.

One of the trick is to do it ala “japanese”: make the camera quite far away so that the player feels a bit of freedom, use as much special effects as you can so that the player forget the camera rigidness in a 3D world and then you have Devil May Cry/God of War/Bayonetta.

It’s really something I hate in single-player games, it’s just too noisy for me. When aesthetic is special I can have it a bit (Madworld, No More Heroes).

In MMOs it’s different. There’s no fast action pace everytime or you don’t have complex task to do like sneaking around a fortress in a realistic way, so it’s less a problem. You’re only watching stats while chatting in a text box anyway.

That’s why I like 2D and First Person View games. In 2D you always know what is going on around you and in FPV you are supposed to know/remember because you have the freedom to look wherever you want.

Computer games allow us to be free like crazy and TPV is way too much fake freedom and a nightmare to produce to be the default game representation.

Damn, it is!

Chocobeam Sound Lab. The beginning.

So I founded my company and called it Chocobeam (Sound Lab). I find that it’s interesting to come out with a word to imagine a name because at some point, it’s pure sound.

When you hear the name of something, the brain converts audio to words to meaning. So the audio layer comes on first, even if it’s for a micromillisecond so you are not even noticing it (because the meaning is really what the brain is searching for).

Anyway this sound is what people are sharing and spreading by word of mouth about you, first. It also can be repeated in the case of a success, billion times everywhere. You’d better sound good when there’s competition, it can make a difference.

So my references are for most of them japanese: Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Softbank etc or from the web and computer world: Twitter, Vimeo, Amazon, Google.. What I found is that:

• They are easy to say for a lot of people around the world. Of course based on english.
• Contraction of two words (Capsule Computer seriously, it’s genius) works good. I personally find that it’s better to have a cool name that having a perfect description of the service/product.
• Three syllables is always a win because it’s like a story: there’s a start, a middle and and end. People love stories. UPS sounds finished, Fedex not much. Two syllables is dangerous, too fast for people to remember it and after three, the more you have the more it’s boring to say. The more you have, the more you can describe and give meaning though. It still often sounds boring or pompous.
• People need to be able to read it and pronounce it well at first try. Super not easy. I remember the first time I heard about Nintendo I thought it was hard to say. And weird to read.

With that in mind, considering my values and what my business is about, I came to Chocobeam. Sounds cute (Chocobo anyone?) and kind of edgy even pronounced ala française (without the Ch dynamic).  Some people just want to read Chocobean but I can’t do nothing for them. Get back to school? Kidding.

The meaning is quite simple: contraction of chocolate and beam, chocolate being me and the beam being my audio. Be kind, to get this brainstorm done I almost had a phlebitis.

Beam has two others meaning though: in french beam is “bim” and it kind of reminds me of the slang in the suburbs of Paris. “BIM! dans ta sale face lààà!” meaning “BAM! motherfucker”, adding a comics-related and active sound while reminding me where I come from.

BEAM is also an acronym and means Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics (BEAM robotics). I think it fits well my work in the interactive design and computer games field.

Looking at that sometime I really believe that how the name of your service/brand/product sounds has a big impact. I wrote about it two years ago when there was so much web 2.0 services with stupid names. Who made it through time? None with weird silly sounding names and difficult pronunciation. Facebook fits my points above. Three-four syllables, good dynamic between consonant and sibilant, easy to say around the world, easy to write and have some meaning (and humor). Instant interest, instant good feeling. Perfect.

Counter example: Aka-Aki. The service is interesting and promising. The name is awful. Freaking not appealing at all. It sounds complicated. It sounds boring (“can you spell it to me?”), you can’t hardly get it the first time you hear it (and I had to search the web to be sure of how it’s written even if I already was aware of his existence!). It’s like people creating this service found that it was a fun and cool name. It’s already killing them outside Germany where they are quite successful.

If you want some consulting on this issue, if you need advices to help you find the timeless name of your product, brand, application, feel free to send an email at info@chocobeam.com.

But first, we need to stop a bit this BS around.

Like the bullshots. We exactly know how they are done, we all know this is pure bullshit compared to real gameplay in-game, with opponents, AI inputs etc

But still, Kotaku for example is full of them more than ever. And people jerk off on it. We had to when we were young because game news were only on paper. In 2009? I don’t even understand.

It’s like this crazyness about figurines and movie adaptation of games. Come on even at 11 years old I knew Doom or Wolfenstein stories were not serious, just here to wrap some outstanding and groundbreaking 3D engines and gameplay. Now they try to make it as if the story was really the core of these games, using the IP to some extreme. Ridiculous.

Sony is launching the PS3 Slim and still loose money on it. As everybody knows, it’s all about software and the PS3 has already lost this battle: games are either multi-platform and sell or Sony exclusive and don’t. For the BR player? Yeah maybe. We sell 1To hard drives for 100$ now and media centers like crazy but yeah, maybe.

I think the public is tired of having to go all the way for a manufacturer, or having no choice but to buy them all. The trend seems to be to go away from closed platforms. Always have been the case: after some hegemony from closed platforms (Amiga, Atari, C64), they suddenly die.

For developers and consumers it’s a win/win. In the Scott Miller ind-depth interview on Gamasutra, we can see that it really has always been the case: the more you aim your game to a large crowd -technically, making sure it runs on the largest chunk of people’s computers- the more you make money. It seems stupid I know. 

“Obviously all your Kroz games were text-based, and you said they sold extremely well. So graphics weren’t a prerequisite at that time to have a successful game for the IBM PC, right?

SM: That appeared to be the case. Most people back in those days when I was doing the Kroz games had CGA cards. EGA was up and coming, but you really couldn’t count on it. These disk magazines like Softdisk wanted the kind of ASCII-based games I was making because they felt like everyone could play them. They didn’t want games that could just work on ten or twenty percent of people’s computers.”

When a developer goes exclusive with a very specific theme in his game –like, WAR- he’s aiming an awful little market. Really juicy ok but with no growth expected. That is what are aiming a lot of publishers these days: 10% of the overall computer market maybe less.

Talking about growth, netbooks sales are up by 40% from last year this quarter. Just sayin’

So to resume: publishers and big names are trying to make sure that we are partying like in 2003 with AAA games and exclusives deals while developers are getting laid off more than ever from that kind of game productions –canceled games every week- with veterans going indie –Chris Hecker man!-. On top of that, consumers are buying games on mobile platforms and tend to enjoy fast and quick game sessions. They use closed platforms when it’s good and different –DS, Iphone- but they know they don’t want that in the future.

They want the fun and the freedom. Developers, don’t forget the freedom part. Oh by the way,

“For 2009, sales are expected to jump to 35 million, rising to an estimated 139 million in 2013.”

About netbooks. I think it could be the case.

For me the netbook is the beginning of the computer becoming something like a fridge, really useful, really efficient, cheap, with the brand that says nothing except that it is totally useless and irrelevant to know it (almost).

What is interesting is that its development around the world is matching the beginning of services like OnLive or Gaikai. David Perry said in some interview:

“You don’t need to have full screen HD to play a game, you just don’t. It needs to be good, but each game has a set size it’ll work at, and we suggest that they go as small as they can while still having a great experience – because the audience will be exponential. The smaller you go, the bigger the audience.”

Playing on screens like the DS/iPhone or the low res of the Wii which are currently the best selling game devices proves the point. People don’t give as much about overall technical graphical achievement that they do for innovation and gameplay and fantasy (which I will discuss later). So if the server side game service is working as in this demo (and this is where Prism or others are gonna be useful):

Well people running little computers with gigabit ethernet or wifi n are gonna be happy. They are legion.

Interesting Masaya Matsuura point of view about the state of music games.

"In Musika, [NanaOn-Sha’s first iPod game] we tried generating game data from ID3 metadata, while, in our most recent game, Major Minor’s Majestic March, we allowed the player to play with the tempo of music, as well as its rhythm. These are just some of the early steps we’ve been taking in trying to expand music gaming beyond ‘Rhythm Action’."

And we sure can do a lot more. Guitar Hero/Rock Band even if they generate millions of dollars are basically always playing the same Rhythm Action card. It’s really fun no doubt about it, but it’s starting to get old as we can see a drop on sales for those two games (-49% overall and a staggering –67% for Rock Band).

I think it’s not really the Rhythm gameplay’s fault. It is very efficient and addictive, I think it’s about music genre and Matsuura-san nails it very well:

"I would be so happy to see a game based around traditional Japanese music, or one featuring Buddhist prayers or chanting," he said.
"Rock Band: The Beatles will fulfill the dreams of many rock fans. But what about fans of other musical styles? Why not give players the chance to conduct the London Philharmonic, for example?"

I think more about Funk and RnB. These are in the real world –and believe me or not, I played a lot of genres with my 4 strings- the funniest music patterns you can musically play: with a strong emphasis on poly-rhythm especially on bass/guitar/drums, killer breakbeats where people need to be sync’d as shit, improvisation where they need to be creative, vocals challenge where they need to go further, a constant call/response design inside songs pushing the band spirit higher, Funk & RnB have everything you need to have fun with. Don’t even get me started on dance moves.

Parappa the music game that every gamer addicted to this sub-genre in games love, is about Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop comes from…Funk and RnB which are the Mothership of all the community dance pop driven music of today, especially with electro music from House to Jungle or whatever, Santogold or Datarock (a “rock” band, I only can hear FUNK in it) or even this Genesis:

You can’t resist this phat bass and the boogie flow, I know. It’s the funk man.

Why not doing games around these genres or more widely, around these patterns? Why not make games about these playful musical roots? It would make non-player people dance around the living room while the plastic band would be playing this funky, complex, heavy fun music. From the 60s to now there’s a gazillion songs ready to make people happy, to challenge them in a way Rock music can’t. Plus from a sad but true opportunity business perspective, a lot of the musicians of these old bands are dead or don’t have the rights of their own music, at all. It would be easy to licence it I guess.

Anyway I don’t really know anybody not loving some groove, at some point. Even the most Sweden metal hardcore fan ever can dance to some Abba disco music sometimes. Maybe not. But the point is that there is not a lot of music capable of making people dance, having fun and be happy, men and women, all across the diversity of this world.

It sounds cheesy but still, the world needs more of that. Fun.

Think about it, simply look at how much MJ has generated funky revenues since he passed away. Music demand since his death surpassed those of Elvis Presley or John Lennon after their suddens death. You can’t look at it and say Funk/RnB music is a niche market targetting a specific public. There’s room. Even for the non-dead non-king ones.

Look at the last.fm statistics of one of the most listened “rock” band in the world:

Red Hot Chili Peppers: 108,435,122 plays (1,944,790 listeners)

It’s better than Metallica, Muse, U2, Queen, Pink Floyd or even the Beatles. This band always had a foot in the Funk. They got produced by George Clinton himself, they have some incredible powerful funk tunes (Sir Psycho!!) and they have the GROOVE. People tend to forget it pretending RHCP is a rock band because culturally speaking the groove is not a “marketable white” thing. Meh.

After observing that the 2000’s music successes were always having some funky parts in them, I think it’s time to get down for real, and use these plastic instruments for other stuffs that power trios, no offense.

From a patterns point of view a lot of Funk/RnB artists old and new could perform well or even insanely well in regards of some infectious songs architectures. The 4 C’s of gamedesign (ppt) are intrinsically embedded in this music.

So Harmonix, if you need (and I guess you do) to extend your games for example to the funkiness, if you need an expertise on this vast music fun fest, we totally should do business together. I’m the funkiest game developer, game audio designer on earth, here’s my playlist and here’s some of my bass playing if you think I’m faking the funk.

Also, follow Bootzilla and Dr Funkenstein on Twitter. They may have something to say like “Harmonix you need to get on the 0ne..”

Music games might not need consoles in the future says  Harmonix creative director Josh Randall:

"Your instrument can have all these songs and you just plug it into your TV. I’m sure it [the genre] is going to start to move in weird ways that no-one’s even thought of yet."

Well maybe hooked to a PC? Or -sorry- to a media streaming center web interface that could do games and download content too? I totally see that happening without the hassle for the consumer that is to choose one console and stick to it. Bill Gates thinks the same for Project Natal. It’s so expensive from the complete Wii set (4 remotes 4 nunchucks power station SDs Wiiboard Wiimotionplus) to the full PS3 one ( 4 gamepads HD all the way). Long life to the generic, refrigerator-like computer. No brand, just plain usefulness. When are we gonna hit this stage in the geeky world?

About brands and iphone dev, fifteen games from the top twenty are selling at the 99 cents price point. Pretty hard to earn something now that the number of games did go from 6,000 to 13,000 in a couple of months, especially with the same problem we encounter in brick and mortar business model. While the 3GS expands the market, it also fragments it a bit especially for little developers: it’s something to do an app for one device. When it’s three or four different it’s not the same. I have some audio fxs for our upcoming game in 32KHz and the ipod Touch don’t do that (don’t ask me why the iphone can) for example. Or how it’s difficult to manage dev over OS updates with the ones you have to pay for on ipod Touch.

i think I want one.

During this time HTC and co are full speed on Android. The last attempt the HTC Hero would let me say that it’s becoming damn mature on the Google side. Ok I already have say so a few months ago but this time it’s real!

The only bad thing about it is that the heavy java based dev environment makes a lot of coders run from this platform for more C++/.NET/Objective C.

“Researchers at North Carolina State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study whether and how video games can boost memory and thinking skills in the elderly – and then to use their findings to develop a prototype video game to do just that.”

Full story. Elderly is the new black. It’s a multi-billion market untapped here! I feel concerned about this because like Will Wright said recently:

"If you look at what people are doing with this technology it is, or has been, mostly directed at 12-year-old boys. But it has the potential to do a whole lot more."

Word.

”I want to be a ninja!” #1stdraftgamelines

Like the artist who did this portrait of Mr Threepwood I don’t really dig the Disney/Dreamworks cartoon-ish style of the “HD” version (and can’t stand the 3D version but it’s selling well and I’m fine with that).

Lucas Arts is re-releasing all of his old adventure games on Steam. Now a game that would really benefit from HD (because already in 3D) is one of the best game ever: Grim Fandango. PLEASE LUCAS DOIT.