Category: Audio&Games

Something really is that in the game industry on this 2009 half year. Triple A games are all sequels –I still have hard times to believe we’re at the fucking number 14 of the Final Fantasy serie- sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s bad the sure thing is, it’s a bit boring. Maybe totally for old fart gamers since the 80s.

Like Eskil was saying:

“Games have never felt so consumable, like they are meant to be played once with minimum of effort, devoid of any need for creative thinking, individualism or personality. They are scripted, shrink wrapped, and ultimately forgettable.”

On the other side the indie game is slowing down because it’s freaking hard to do a good, original profitable game. Innovation is becoming a stereotype (let’s do crazy things even if it’s not really fun/balanced!). And people are hard to convince, always the same pattern: familiarity feeds automatically, instantly happiness and fun. Even if it’s not really a good thing.

Digital distribution was the number one channel for them but now big classic publishers are ruining this situation, getting their games on front page like they did IRL in game shops.

It’s no exciting times I guess. I feel it around me and in the game news. Id Software bought by ZeniMax? Quite astonishing for an independent studio for so long –since 1991!-.

It makes sense in this world of casual things with broad appeal, exactly the market Id is not targetting with its IPs. Plus Id is a tech company, there will be I guess, a consolidation from a 3D engine point of view with the Bethesda and Gamebryo folks. I’d rather have all in Id Tech 5 though (tools seem well done).

It’s interesting to see the construction of middleware, getting more and more efficient and maybe capable of being the Panavision of games. Warren Spector, I hear you.

Blizzard is not shipping Starcraft II with multiplayer LAN, less freedom for users boo! I blame F2P games and shareholders for that. And Drew’s cancer of course.

Yeah that’s a game.

Blueberry Garden is out since a week. It’s a short game, strange and soothing with a great music. 5 euros for some dreams, go get it and support it.

Free Realms, over 2 million users in less than a month. Big social networking stuffs plus video upload to Youtube from the game.

Scribblenauts did have a good response at the E3 (named best game of the show several times). It seems like a japanese game but it’s not. I like what 5thCell US developer did on the gameplay and art style.

Solving problems with words summoning them in the game world is really clever. And boosts emergent gameplay.

Interview of ThatGameCompany people at Kotaku.

I’m not a fan of the new art of Monkey Island the Remake. Delicious details from the making of the original at Grumpy Gamer. And then I want my childhood back. The circus blew me away that’s true.

Homeless Sims.

The game audio mixing revolution? Well I don’t know, I’m more thinking about before the final stage of sounds in computer games. The final stage is mostly handled by machines by now, it’s gonna increase. The important thing is before. I can’t see that without MIDI and heavy use of soft samplers and synthetizers.

We’re not gonna be able to follow emergent gameplay and communities with pcm and rigid sound assets now that’s for sure.

Fantastic read on Gamasutra with Tim Sweeney’s interview.

Jill Of The Jungle –which I played an insanely amount of time, very well paced game at that time-, the connection with North Europe coders –Netherlands, Finland-, the Wolfenstein shock etc. There is an interesting quote about the graphic side of games:

“But there’s another problem in graphics that’s not as easily solvable. It’s anything that requires simulating human intelligence or behavior: animation, character movement, interaction with characters, and conversations with characters. They’re really cheesy in games now.”

Cheesy and more and more cheesy because graphically it’s more and more realistic. The last game engine that did shock me was Source with Half Life2 first presentation at E3 2003 for human characters and of course Crysis for the environment stuffs.

Since then every big 3D games seems cheesy in some way to be and as Tim points out, we still don’t have the algorithms to make it better, brute force computing power is not going to solve that.

CPUs technology has really slow down since a year or so and we’re still struggling to use efficiently the horsepower of those dual or + cores. So what’s next? I’d say a focus on experience, gameplay and of course, audio.

This is why we see so much peripherals for games these days, it’s a good way to enhanced experience. The question is to what point?

Tony Hawk Ride

Scratch DJ

I don’t know. As a guy doing real skateboard and real music I know it’s for fun, I know Rock Band is fun, that it makes people wanting to do the real thing etc.

But it’s getting silly. Faux-ollie? Faux-Djing which is already a stripped-down version of doing music?

Come on. I have a hard time to believe in those peripherals not only from a gameplay point of view but also from a housekeeper perspective: it takes a large amount of place for a few experiences. Let’s see how it’s gonna work but I feel a disturbance in the peripheral Force.

We’ll see at the E3. I’m even gonna be able to test it!

So what’s up in the game realm?

The big news is developer 3D Realms closing his doors. Duke Nukem Forever will not be –at least for now- after 12 years of development. I feel it’s fair to see that this big AAA business model was not working and that it’s really not working. Told you.

But at the same time I feel very bad for people working for over a decade for almost nothing. That’s crazy.

Gamasutra posted a really good opinion on game music today. Here’s something interesting:

“Casual games, with their simple, bright graphics, have the design space to use melody and more dynamic themes, as Mario did, and yet by and large they don’t. Try the Ookibloks advanced course video on YouTube as a counter example. The music is distinctive, and perfectly integrated into the casual nature of the gameplay.”

First, apparently Ookibloks will never be out and once again, this is really sad.

But on the subject, Ookibloks was meant to use music frome the beginning, as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview of Work3 developer, Mr Flanagan:

“The audio system, I feel, is a whole new take on quantized audio. The idea of quantizing sound effects is well established, thanks to Tetsuya Mizuguchi, but the technique of also making the sound effects match the key of the background song, and also change dynamically according to key changes is something nobody has done before, as far as I know.

The musical influences come from all over. I could cite "real" bands such as Dee-Lite, Daft Punk, Betty Boo, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and the sound of the Japanese "Shibuya Kei" music scene, but also game music composers such as Nintendo’s Koji Kondo and Cave’s Manabu Namiki. All these external influences get churned up in my head and then reconstituted in my own music. It’s my first time attempting these musical styles — I’m more a techno kind of musician, usually!”

This is one of the proof that Tommy Tallarico is a bit wrong saying there’s plenty of diversity in game music: in the comments everyone is cheering John Williams and orchestral music BEFORE everything else. Ookibloks stood out for Brandon Sheffield so it did for me one year ago because its music was funky fresh, that kind of happy music called J-pop these days. Yeah, like western people only want games to live in a tearful world with sad stories, grey and brown graphics killing people in the quickiest possible way.

Anyway.

99% of casual games don’t pay attention to music because a lot of developers seem to think about casual people as people with no taste.

PopCap do a lot of work around music and audio FXs on their games. No wonder why this polishing is part of their success (addictive music video, 200 000 views before the game was out, music by Laura Shigihara plus the game is fucking crack). 2DBoy did the same with World of Goo with music composed by Kyle Gabler, game designer coder and musician.

Respect music and it will give you back a lot.

On the same note, very interesting post mortem of Rhythm Heaven with Satoru Iwata, Nintendo boss.

“I seem to remember that everyone on the development staff took dance lessons* in order to obtain a shared awareness of rhythm.”

Imagine western developers moving their ass for real on music to make themselves aware of rhythm and poly-rhythm.. Haha. I find the following sentence so interesting:

“He had a strong desire to improve Japanese people’s sense of rhythm through the game. Which reminds me, we use the word "groove-sense" to describe what’s fun about this game. Osawa-san, did you come up with that word?”

Boy do I feel concerned! I play RnB/Funk/Soul a couple of hours everyday and damn, the groove is one of the funniest thing in music (and this is why I stick to that stuff, it’s so much fun to play and I did funky rock à la RHCP). Maybe this is it. Groove == Fun. I’ll develop that later.

You should have seen Eskil’s videos by now. In case you didn’t, do it now.

101,880,503. This is the number of creations in Spore today.

So Gears of War producer said crunch was necessary. Here we go again.

Crunch makes work relationship between people tighter, a bit like firemen fighting flames that’s true. The cost (unhealthyness) is just not worth the price (better game? not necessarily shipped on time? neither).

There’s more (via BoingBoing) and this is where it has to stop. As a comment points out on Greg’s site:

“To tie in to the quality of life discussion, the reason I’m not working for a game studio right now is that before you are offered a job, they always ask you if you’re "passionate" about working in games. Not everyone uses the same word(s), but they always ask a question designed to determine just how far over you’re willing to bend. I take my work very seriously, I am competent and dedicated, I work hard, and I strive to work efficiently. When the situation calls for it, I will work until the job is done. What I will not do is allow myself to be used like a five dollar whore until I burn out, or until my handlers have the opportunity to replace me with a two dollar whore.”

This is why I switched to indie self-employed status with some scary unemployement times. But I can’t no longer stand that “philosophy” which is kind of pure BS allowing the childish/teenage culture of people unable to stop what they do until someone does. It’s not managing people, it’s nursing peons.

A comment on Gamasutra:

“I continue to find it hilarious that guys like Rod Fergusson are arrogant enough to believe that they know better than a century-worth of collated data on worker productivity which has lead every other industy to realise what constitutes an optimal (40hr, 5 day) working week.”

And still going down, thanks to technological progress (Naturalmotion someone?). From a cultural point of view, crunch is used to be the mark of the elite league of game developers, the mark of the triple A where students dream to be. It’s moving fast and now, digital distribution is there and indie game is hawt.

It’s like a few people are noticing that better tools and better skilled people are the way to work efficiently when sucking all the energy of passionate guys six days a week is not. Once again comments at BB are great:

“Of course, what people don’t know is that during "downtime" at some of these companies you

get paid for 40 hours a week to simply show up and hang out.”

Yeah, this is a friggin’ bad business habit to ship millions dollars games in a one-two months window around the end of year with maxed out competition. And then people are so dead tired from the heavy loaded work summer, they do just nothing for months. If those dead times are the counterpart of 60+ hours weeks, maybe there’s some improvement to be done in managing teams and projects earlier in the production process? I don’t know.

“Having worked for many years in the game industry (and still tangentially close to it), I

can attest that I would not wish a career at a game company on my worst enemy. It is a soul

crushing business — and that’s at the best of times.”

9 years in the business. Do I have coworkers from 2000 still working in the industry? Yeah, like 1% maybe less.

I love that one:

“[..]at every company I’ve been at the management practices a not-so-subtle form of passive-aggressiveness:

"Well, yes, I understand your wife’s birthday is this weekend, and of course here at Entertainment Conglomerate we believe that family comes first. Now the rest of the team will be in over the weekend, and it’s possible the CTO might be in as well. Sometimes he likes to come downstairs, just see who might be around, but really not a problem. And as long as you’ve got that code branch complete ahead of schedule, I’m sure taking the weekend off won’t affect your eventual bonus [after having already worked a thousand hours] in the slightest, compared to one of the other programmers who is less diligent but never goes home."

Last year I was working in a big wide open space in pure concrete. I had to design audio with coders meeting around me, with the most efficient and noisy hand dryer in the world pretty near too. It was batshit crazy and management told me I was leaving a bit early at 6:00pm while my bleeding ears were just saying to myself “fuck you fuck you well, fuck you today I won’t work anymore for you!!”. Coders were at work until everybody was out I did that too in the past, I know how work is not really the same when there’s no manager around. Classic cooptation. Follow the horde or die tryin’? Hell no.

 
I prefer fighting that zombie attitude. 

But there’s something we can’t change: tracking problems and elaborate solutions are things that makes you totally unaware of time because if you do, you definitely won’t find anything. Composing music is quite the same, time doesn’t matter when you’re building things, solving problems with your mind and little action from your hands. This power of doing with no dependancies at all makes us wanting to achieve the daily goal. “If I finish that, if I fix this..”. Still, it’s manageable.

Anyway a little change like one line of code or two notes can dramatically change everything. You don’t have that power with visual design, eyes are not efficient enough to feel some pixels change whereas a tiny code change that make the game more robust or a music arrangement that add melancoly is perceptible by a large crowd. Not only by people making it.

Petri did a game on that whole subject.

Wanna join the 60+ hours week anyway? Read this. Want to understand why we work less now than ever before ? Read this.

Wow. GDC annual rant. I started reading Chris Hecker report and saw Heather Chaplin’s more important one.

You see it’s really funny. Her under reported rant has many points and yet all I can find on the web (interestingly enough, I found more with twittersearch than with google) is people whining about snippets of what she said.

They totally prove her point. We’re a bunch of fucking adolescents that can’t take some critics especially from a woman without yelling YOU BITCH. Reports and responses on the web demonstrate that.

I often complain about the immaturity of the industry. People want to see that as elitism but it’s not. It’s just a view that I don’t want to have something like sex+violence=fun for all the games we make, as a value we absolutely need to fullfill our fantasies with. I did enjoy this shit since when I first could, I enjoyed it from like 86 to now so yeah I’m kinda fucking fed up with especially with nine years in the industry. When I see Wolfenstein3D on the iphone I don’t care, RE 5 is the same etc I don’t believe I’m the only one. Peer pressure is at it.

Others medium have a large and wide panel of tastes and feelings, we don’t. This is the damn point people.

So the first search result about Heather is at David Jaffe’s blog. He knows her so that’s a cool rant.

“The two children whom I spawned and whom I support and love and nurture every day would beg to differ. Even when dog tired, even as a divorced dad who is trying to figure out his new life, I still am an amazing father who shows up for those kids every day. And I do so with joy and love and a strong sense of gratitude that they are in my life. To me, this is the measure of a man, not an adolescent.
The employees who work for the company I co-own and co-founded, the employees-who after years of working at it have become some of the best programmers and artists in the business and who previously created simulations for the government in order to train the troops that protect our country-are clearly adults, not adolescents.”

Well I don’t want to criticize –just debunking- but spawning kids is not an adult stuff, it’s a mamal thing we all can do even as teenagers. Plus sorry but only a long time will let you know if you are an “amazing” father. Founding a startup after ten years or so in a big company with a multi year deal with that big company is not a hard adult choice, it’s a good and quite safe challenge. Nothing to brag about as a ballsy adult thing.

Heather’s point is still valid with that kind of arguments. They may even prove it.

“Sure, I think our industry CAN do better at making games more impacting by mixing meaning and entertainment.”

This is the POINT!! We CAN et we SHOULD ffs. We should push more on it because that’s what games that count are: Deus Ex, Ico, Fallout Katamary Damacy etc have all that damn sense, it makes games stronger no question about it. So stop dodging this fact all the time saying that only bloody gory fun counts or that YOU as a game maker or a player don’t want to care about this stuff and so that it’s crap. It’s childish.

We should have more and more shades of themes and ideas behind our games than only power fantasy as says PixelVixen707:

“It’s eerie how rarely the qualities she ticked off find a place in games. This is important not just to the girls, but to the boys who don’t dream of being a marine or a quarterback. In music, boys can listen to boys who aren’t macho. If balls-out, cock-out rock ain’t your thing, you can listen to Belle & Sebastian. There’s a spectrum of masculinity and femininity, and endless ways for both boys and girls to respond to it. But in games, aggression is the default, and relationships are usually as clumsy as a third-grade dance.”

We absolutely don’t have that. We don’t search for it because we’re not really trying to for a question of paycheck and market but more seriously because the industry lacks diversity: with a 88,5% male 83.3% white 92% heterosexual population (GDC 09 pics make me sad) how the FUCK could we be able to build shades of fun based on values like responsibility, introspection, intimacy, or intellectual discovery that would appeal to a LARGE and DIVERSE population?

We can’t so we rely on the same old shit that sells well and then we blame Heather and people like her for not being able to understand us? It’s childish.

Of course we can’t really compare with music and movies in the 30 years of our existence because we don’t have the same tools history: microphone technology was up really early and never really changed. Movie camera is the same. Game engine? Oh boy.

Still, Heather is right. In thirty years or more we should have done better.

I think I’ll let Jason Della Rocca who did a great job at IGDA before resigning from it finish this rant about people ranting about Heather’s rant with this post:

“Sorry for not having the leadership skills to beat the barriers of participation inequality. Less than 1% of the IGDA membership are truly active in driving the org forward. Sorry for not doing a better job building up a strong pipeline of community leaders and volunteers. Sorry for not overcoming your general apathy and laziness.

Sorry for not getting you to be more serious about the profession of game development. You are no longer a bunch of hacks. This is a real art and science. We need to be way more deliberate and control the path the profession takes as it evolves into the future.

Most of all, sorry for not doing more to help you realize your power! Both, collectively as a profession to tackle industry issues, and as creators of culture. You are all having a massive impact on society. You are transforming the world day-by-day without even realizing it.

Oh well, fuck you, it’s not my job anymore!”

• Social responsability.

As every year, Alice does an awesome job when it comes to panel translation. Lorne Lanning said interesting things:

“I think a lot of us are so full of shit. Most action gaming is really sociopathic. What we do we do, we love blowing shit away, that’s sociopathic.”

But in real life how developers live is kinda sociopathic too: playing action violent games, gathering in small dedicated crowd, stuffing themselves with junk food.. Sometimes it’s necessary I’m ok on this, but do we really have to make it as “the true” game developer lifestyle? How can we make games be more responsible when we aren’t? With lifes as healthy as they were when we were in college? No wonder that our field is lacking women or that game developers girlfriends don’t really exist. No wonder why we don’t try to adress society problems like aging fast population and elderly market (man, it’s gonna be so huge in a few years). Our medium is powerful we all recognize this. Time to fucking grow up. We can be responsible AND childish. The second has been done for years now.

“The other thing is how well do you sleep at night. [When making Oddworld] we were told several times ‘you know, I feel great, I’m publishing a game that I can go home and show my kids.”

This is only true with non-sociopathic gamedev peeps, like a very few are. People don’t give a shit about responsability in the industry, it’s not something we’re searching for sadly. I tend to, trying to respect myself, having a normal life. That’s suppose people to get better at what they do, there is room but guess what they don’t. They want to do games as we make movies. 3D modelers often can’t stop dreaming about the big black screen for example. They move triangles all day and night long while having breaks watching Pixar trailers and playing sociopathic games.

See?

the panel was apparently dodging a real good question:

“There was a last question about how the panel was dodging this idea that games can teach good, but at the same time can’t be held responsible for provoking realworld violence, which seems to be a paradox to many.”

It can be held responsible for provoking realworld violence, no question about that, we just don’t want to acknowledge this because we fear others medias would kill us all talking shit about how we badly influence young people with violent games, as they already do everytime they can.

Eskil’s Love game. Dude it’s code, we can do everything. Every. Things.

Madworld is all about destroying people but the visuals are meant to translate a dreamy world, like it doesn’t really exist. GTA IV plays the “it’s almost fucking real” card and no matter what people think, it’s not helping the medium.

But it makes large teams work for years on that kind of game production.

If we want less of that, less technical updates of games, less social responsability dodging BS we need people to get better at making games like suggests Eskil.

“Making games is a little like being a fashion designer. Fashion is not about making beautiful clothing, Its about making beautiful people. A successful designer is not the one who is in the center, but some one who makes the wearer the center. The story isn’t yours, its the players.”

This is why I totally focused myself on games, forgetting about movies. Forgetting about stories. Digging books on game design, stuffing my head with technical coding stuffs etc I don’t see a lot of designers doing so. They’re “artists” you know… Eskil wrote:

“Concept art stems from the idea that you need to quickly pre-visualize your game before you get to the expensive task of actually making it. Our goal should be to cut the cost of making the content so much that Concept art is no longer needed.”

I think that’s really true. Concept art is friggin’ slow! While I understand the “wow” effect for the old publisher-brick and mortar way to do business, designing ingame as soon as possible is way better to make it effectively in-game. This is why I just can’t stand the VIDEO before games, it makes people focus on the visual part of the medium instead of the game experience. Drives me crazy, it’s as stupid as saying bio vegetables.. Oh wait.

We live some stunning times don’t we? We need to put the obvious in front of things. This is not a mark that we are getting smarter if you ask me. Like the rest of the society, the industry has made a terrific job at making posers famous and all. But making games is hard and you can’t really fake it it’s almost automatically translated in a bad experience or something gamers are going to feel as wrong like a bad balance or heterogeneous assets.

This is where ease of developement is critical.

• On ease of development.

Iteration. This word I really learn about reading Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, is the main thing: we have to iterate things, assets, stuffs, ideas, everything in the real game engine. As soon as possible, as often as needed.

For that coding and tools should be fast and efficient. And this is where open source is limited right now and still, because there is two cases from a game design point of view:

-You are not efficient on these technologies and you’re having hard times to tweak things that should work by themselves because they are just trivial from a gameplay perspective.

-You are super efficient on these technologies. For that you are digging so much tech that you are no longer working on a game, you are working around a game.

When technology is hard to work with, specialists are needed to do things. When technology is easy, generalists are better at achieving that. In small teams with rapid iteration process, the latter is much more useful.

With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why Capcom loves the 360, why Keita prototypes Noby Noby Boy on 360, why a polished game made by a dude alone is possible in one year and a half and a good framework, why the IGF winner is a game made by one man with MS tools (XNA once again), why a lot of GGJ games were done in Flash or DirectX, why Fmod rules the game audio world etc

Of course we tend to prefer open solutions, that’s a no-brainer. But being able to do stuffs extremely fast or with limited ressources (like on the game I work, toolchain made by one man in one month, full .Net C#) is the real key there.

Eskil-like people are way too rare, as he said on his blog.. But they are the real game designers. I do my best to be like that.

It’s like OnLive makes people angry. Of course it’s kinda revolutionary. Let’s look at arguments. Like this one:

“Let’s say tens of thousands of people sign up for the launch of Run, Shoot, Kill, Repeat 10. That’s the sole reason they’ve signed up for the service, and it’s their first impression. They, like a ton of other people, want to play the game the first second it’s available. Good luck managing that demand spike without having crap performance and pissing everyone off.”

You guys remember the launch of Steam? Ask Valve people how many players were puking on the service when it launched. It was in 2003 after being revealed at the GDC 02 and digital distribution was exactly at the same point that cloud computing is today: something nobody is arguing against that it is the future and yet nobody is doing it.

Now Steam has 20M+ user accounts and they’re the big fucking beast, the leader of the games digital distribution that everyone is trying to compete. I think OnLive is ready to take the risk to piss off users on day one. No problem.

Second argument I read a lot:

“The problem is in the nature of the task.  Games are inherently compute intensive.  There’s a reason that you need a behemoth of a machine to run Crysis.
For a service of this kind to make any money, you need to be able to support tens of thousands of users at the same time.  Halo 3, for example, has 80k users online as I write this.  Granted, this is across the entire world, but the hardware to support the  simulation, rendering and video compression for each of those games would be staggering.”

Who said it would only be Crysis and über heavy demanding games that people are going to play? What about a game like GRID running on a little 8.9” netbook screen? It sure demands a lot less power than on a 24”. Who said people are going to play games which need extreme reactivity? World of Goo can be played with a big latency I guess. If I look at my software synthesizers, “real time latency” –below 5ms- is not needed for a lot of things (even if for some like drums it’s mandatory). SF IV is running smoothly online and frankly I’m impressed. A few years ago it was still a dream plagged with issues.

I think people are a bit jealous :) Of course publishers have already signed up otherwise they’re really going to die: developers could push their game on the service without worrying about publishers, exclusivity shit deals. Noby Noby Boy and Flower would totally benefit from a service like this (remember the spectator value). Instead of that, they’re stuck on a platform and nobody cares about them despite the fact that they’re really cool games. Go OnLive, go. And make room for game developers, they’re going to make you successful.

I’ll do a third post on GDC about ease of development and social responsability.

Last week was my first time with Madworld on Wii. Disturbing, assumed and viciously joyful.

 
COME HEEERE

Man, I could say I knew it! for a lot of things from this GDC year.

First, the OnLive thing. It’s everywhere on my game feeds. As Gamasutra says:

“The ambitious venture, which hopes to revolutionize the gaming world by removing the need to continually upgrade PC hardware or buy new gaming consoles every generation, makes use of cloud computing — doing all of the game’s video and audio processing on remote servers, then streaming the resultant images and sound back to the user quickly enough to play games in real time.”

You can watch the conference here. It demoed a Crysis play session on a Dell studio 15, the one I use to type this post. When I play some Valve stuff, the laptop is getting like a hoover and I just can’t stand it.

Some days ago I was talking about Asus and cheap PCs. For those platforms I was thinking about casual and not heavy raw power demanding games of course. But with a service like OnLive, it could be every games.

Imagine playing games from the eee keyboard, co-op mode with eee sticks, unplugging and plugging  from screens to screens without worrying about technical shit.. The NAS could be a great memory cache for the service etc At last, an open/closed easy and limitless platform to play and develop for. From the double consumer/developer view, it’s heaven.

There’s still a lot to solve from a technical perspective for the heavier games but it’s very promising and sure is the future.

The main attract for me is the spectator value. I love to watch people play, I have countless hours of HLTV with SoGamed –when the site was red and black-, or on the couch analyzing my buddies playing consoles. For the spread of the medium, of the gameplay experience of the game culture it can’t be done more easily than with channels to switch like on the familiar TV set.

It’s really exciting.

One famous analyst said that it would be the last console generation. Sorry dude, I said the same a year ago (can’t show you my archives are still broken). Now I guess Nintendo would move to the cloud as soon as they can –in Nintendo terms, when it’s making money for them from day one- with a new Wii, competing OnLive. MS/Sony would follow. Look at how the giant of the electronic is doing well thanks to the N1 number crushing beast aka DQ:

here are the February NPD’s:
Wii–753,000
360–391,000
PS3–276,000
PS2–131,000
There are plenty of ways to look at that data, and if you’re Sony, they’re all bad. PS2 and PS3 sales combined, which have been a hallmark of post-announcement PR spin, were down 35% compared to 2008. PS3 sales were roughly flat (276k vs. 281k in 2008), but in February of 2008, PS3 unit sales accounted for 29% of next-gen (360, PS3, Wii) console sales. This year? 19.4%. So Sony’s PS3 sales stayed flat in a month with much higher next-gen unit sales overall.
Oh, and PSP sales? Down over 18% in February compared to last year.
Combined, and there’s only one word to describe that: freefall.

I mean the two monsters consoles are struggling to make money. For real. At a big, big expense. Software is moving so fast, it’s quite sure they can’t keep up with PCs and cloud computing. So.. Yeah. Good news for everyone that counts in the equation: this generation is going to last very long, and developers should be free to go for the digital distribution on computers called personal computers.

In an older post I was writing:

“This year once again north guys are at it (meanwhile they were around for years): Erik Svedäng from Blueberry Garden fame which has never really had a fame BUT the game always seduced me (audio atmosphere, physics, simplicity I’m sold!), here’s the trailer.”

Blueberry Garden won the IGF! Awesome. I knew this game had something especially charming. Good luck for the full production Erik! And really, these guys from the north ROCK.

More on GDC after grokking more.

Exceptionnellement ce post sera écrit en french.

Le gamedev français. Je ne comprends pas ce qu’il s’y passe. Il y a des bons jeux et des jolis succès en France (Soul Bubbles, Dofus, Globz Trackmania Dark Messiah Fuel qui sort bientôt, Edge sur iphone etc), paradoxalement il n’y a pas d’union inter-développeurs autour de ces succès. La seule communication se passe autour de bruits de couloir –en général bien flippants- sur telle ou telle boite.

Cette réflexion vient après la révélation d’un lecteur ;) impressionné par le fait que je lâche tout ce contenu sans retour. Comme mon blog est quasi séparé en deux mylife/gamesgamesgames, j’ai quand même de longs et intéressants articles sur le sujet.

Ce n’est pas tant le manque de retour qui me chagrine, c’est plutôt l’absence de développeurs qui parlent qui me frappe. Ca ne pipe pas mot !

On fait des jeux en France depuis l’aube du médium, j’ai passé une bonne partie de mon adolescence à jouer à des jeux français (Titus..) et anglais si je regarde bien. Resident Evil doit énormément à Alone in the Dark. Another World Flashback sont des références pour de nombreux game designers à travers le monde… J’ai voulu faire ce métier parce que ça semblait non seulement possible ici mais parce qu’en plus il y a avait un sacré niveau et une envie d’aller plus loin chez nous. Très excitant aux premiers abords.

J’ai vite déchanté. Aucune émulsion. Les créateurs originaux de ces titres ont disparu. Ils sont là tels des fantômes à roder d’interviews “c’était mieux avant” à “le futur ça sera ça” mais l’activité et le mouvement n’existent pas ou peu.

On a une soif de hiérarchie c’est dingue. Les “anciens” des 80s et 90s qui ignorent complètement ceux du début 2000 –dont je fais parti- et les ptis djeuns qui sortent de l’école à faire des jeux et pour qui ma génération et celle des vieux complètement autodidactes ont une relation ambivalente à leur sujet (on vomit dessus tout en en faisant pour nombre de professionnels, une grosse source de revenus). L’entraide devrait aller de soi, le passage de savoir-faire évident.

Aucune connexion, aucun effet de réseau. Nada queud, tous les sites du genre ont pourri sur place comme Jiraf par exemple (que je viens d’aller visiter, c’est consternant cf le “programmateur iphone”).

Pareil mon pote, pareil. 

Ultra scolaire aussi. On m’a proposé de donner des cours sur le game audio alors que ça faisait même pas trois ans que j’étais dans le milieu. De mon point de vue je donnerais des cours quand j’en aurais fini de faire des jeux et que je pourrais donner de précieux conseils. C’est à dire sans doute jamais.

Entre 2001 et 2003 il y a eu un énorme boom sur le forum de l’IGDA Paris, des réflexions et des débats très intéressants autour du jeu. Il y a six ans, les développeurs de jeux français étaient pleins, on discutait dur il y avait tous les métiers regroupés sur une page web à parler de l’avenir. C’était chouette. Ca a duré trois mois.

Très vite trolls, peines-à-jouir et gros aigris de la mort ont fait couler l’intérêt de discuter. Pareil sur Jiraf, en pire. Nous sommes vraiment des gros cons là dessus on est trop mauvais.

A croire qu’en France on ne parle et on ne partage que pour donner des leçons ou pour dénigrer les autres alors c’est sur c’est pas franchement constructif. A croire qu’on ne comprend pas l’intérêt de l’esprit d’équipe.

Quand je vois la somme de connexions positives que j’ai pu créer en dehors de l’hexagone, sans bouger mon cul de Vincennes, ça me fait halluciner, d’autant plus que mes connections parisiennes tiennent sur une demi main en quasi dix ans. Quand je vois à quel point les américains non-français partagent l’info, que ce soit les blogs des développeurs indépendants qui détaillent leur process de prod ou bien le pdg d’une boite qui donne sa vision de ce qu’il va se passer dans le futur, je suis sans voix. C’est devenu habituel sauf que ce sont des gens loin et qui ne parlent pas ma langue natale. Ne me dites que c’est parce qu’on ne parle français qu’en France. Même entre nous chez nous on ne partage rien à part les vannes sur le gameplay d’un confrère.

Un peu ce style le gamedev français: nasty, mystérieux, trop sur de lui et fumeur de clopes. 

Regardez la Suède, ces dernières années la dynamique qui s’est mise en place avec des petits jeunes de 20 ans ravagés par l’acné qui font des jeux, s’entraident en parlant des jeux des autres, montent des blogs et parlent en anglais pour se faire comprendre par tout le monde etc

C’est pas difficile l’anglais, c’est obligatoire dans le domaine donc je vois pas comment les gens arrivent ou ne serait-ce qu’essayent de ne surtout PAS le lire ni l’écrire et d’attendre les trads en français. Cette touffe de poils au creux de la main c’est insane (ça rejoint ce que je disais sur le cd-iii).

Pourquoi est ce que les gens sont des putains de pierres ici ? Moi aussi j’en suis une mais je me soigne même si je fais pas la pub partout de mon blog j’écris suffisamment depuis longtemps pour tomber parfois ici quand je fais des recherches alors… Je tombe sur personne d’autre en dehors des médias web (gamekult et cie).

Je repense aux nombreux mails à des “collègues” du milieu restés sans réponses, même ceux à des compositeurs ou sound designers (une des rares boite à m’avoir toujours répondu illico sans y connaitre aucun contact est Arkane à qui je tire mon chapeau) quand à peu près 100% des mails envoyés ailleurs ont tous reçus une réponse, que ce soit Media Molecule pour bosser sur LBP ou bien chez le mec du FBI, toujours une réponse voir un encouragement dans la foulée.

Jeff Tunnell m’a fait pareil en écoutant mon travail et en en disant du bien. En le connaissant absolument de nulle part.

Je recherche ça, j’essaye encore ici mais les dernières fois où j’ai tendu des trucs de game design à des game designers –Raph Koster, project Horseshoe, Stéphane Bura hey un français qui partage !- les mecs m’ont plus parlé. A croire que quand j’essaie de trouver un terrain d’entente c’est pris pour de la compétition… Je ne sais plus comment réagir moi.

La semaine prochaine, c’est la GDC l’évènement de l’année à San Francisco. Le chapitre européen se déroulera en Allemagne à Cologne.

Il faut qu’on se soigne, vraiment.