Category: Audio&Games

There’s this game called Just Cause. It’s about blowing stuff up, driving vehicles and flying around. It’s the most perfect action game ever, in the way that the gameplay and the game engine really allow you to trip: it’s like a GTA game with the craziest gadgets. It’s great fun.

They just released the 4th iteration of that game and apparently, it’s a disaster. For some reasons, producers decided to add all that weird unlocking/challenges/grind fest for “engagement” and streaming I guess? It started with the previous game and they just went further into this, despite not really making people happy at all.

What’s so infuriating is that the core game is fantastic but you can’t appreciate it the way you want because they put some rigid obstacles in front of it, like terrible key mapping, awful menus and other super arbitrary designs. It’s just incomprehensible. How do you mess up UI that much in 2018, on the 4th version of your game? How?

Imagine an awesome TV show where they decided to flip the picture 90° to the left so that you have to watch in an awkward position. That’s how those production decisions feel like.

It reminds me of EA and Burn Out, another quite timeless game from 2001. The only thing people complained about was the annoying DJ talking all the time and the unskippable intro with Guns n Roses. They remastered the game this year. You would think that they would listen and simply take out two elements that are bothering players and that are absolutely not core to the experience, right? They left that shit in. They could at least give you a choice, a simple on/off toggle. No. There’s a mod to do it though.

What’s up with being actively deaf to reasonable requests from players who want to spend money and spread the word about your game? I don’t get it. Developers ask for feedback, listen and just do the opposite. It’s bizarre. We really have to do better because we’re looking like clowns with that stuff.

Epic has consistently sought to exploit African-American talent in particular in Fortnite by copying their dances and movements," writes Carolynn Beck, the attorney for 2 Milly. "Epic has copied the dances and movements of numerous African-American performers, including, for example, the dance from the 2004 Snoop Dogg music video, ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ (named the ‘Tidy’ emote), Alfonso Ribeiro’s performance of his famous ‘Carlton’ dance on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air television show (named the ‘Fresh’ emote), the dance performed by Will Smith on the same television show (named the ‘Rambunctious’ emote), the dance in Marlon Webb’s popular ‘Band of the Bold’ video (named the ‘Best Mates’ emote), Donald Faison’s signature dance seen on the NBC television show Scrubs (named the ‘Dance Moves’ emote), and, most pertinent here, Terrence Ferguson’s Milly Rock dance.

Link.

Context reminder: the game industry has a workforce that is less than 2% black. It’s been like this since forever. There are virtually no changes. African-Americans create tons of pop culture, most of it being very popular, like dance moves.

That shit is iconic (I remember seeing Donald’s routine the first time on Scrubs, so perfect and hilarious) and Epic is making loads of money off of that. Their attorneys probably made sure that they could profit from that content without getting sued. They’re getting sued. It might not go far but it seems pretty obvious that this whole situation isn’t right. In May, Fortnite brought in $318M. One. Month. Redistribute (some) wealth where it’s due, goddamn.

Note: Epic has stopped bragging about how much money they gross with Fortnite months ago. *winks*

I was reading this article on the death of Looking Glass. There’s this excerpt:

Looking Glass died because a series of problems compounded each other into a financially lethal situation. No single factor is to blame. No single person or entity killed Looking Glass. No one problem was enough, on its own, to kill the company. Nonetheless, the problems were deadly when combined.

It’s never just one factor for anything, pretty much ever.

And so when I see what’s going on around loot boxes, this is what we need to keep in mind: it’s not just companies that are to blame. Young players are to blame too because they indulge in skins. Parents are to blame to allow their kids to buy them. Older brothers and sisters close their eyes or make fun of their siblings, making them even more compelled to buy virtual items. Companies close their eyes too because loot boxes are absurdly lucrative.

Where do we go from here though?

http://lagamespace.org/

I loved everything about that project. The logo. The people behind it. The Kickstarter campaign being wildly successful. The mission. Everything looked awesome. I backed it, tried to help and participate, never got an email back.

After fees and failed pledges, $306,915 remained. More than half of this was spent on the initial renovation and leasing of the warehouse.

I still fail to understand how, say, $175K were not enough to renovate and lease a small warehouse. Game developers pretty much only need outlets and some relative quiet. I feel like organizers –as it happens so often with crowdfunding campaigns- went too hard and thought that they could afford architects and such. Same with rewards: pushing for original games made just for the backers sounded a bit crazy to me (you know it takes forever to make a good game, right?). Overreaching is so common in crowdfunding and yet, campaigns always fall into that trap.

While LA/GS is gone, its goal remains valid and we encourage others to pursue this dream: To explore and expand the potential of videogames as a creative medium.

We are, game developers of all kinds, already doing that: there are tons of wacky and weird games out there! It’s always been the case since the beginning of computer games. That’s not the dream. What we need is to secure some ways to sustain our creative medium that is so demanding. We need to sustain its craftsmen and women. Its workforce there, I said it. We need to sustain common foundations to build better and more under control than what we’ve done in the past. Unity and Unreal are just a couple stones. We need so much more. We need to get away from the Me Too paradigm that is making computer game culture a joke. So much has been written by stellar minds on the subject of game development and game design and we’re not leveraging anything! It’s quite unreal.

It doesn’t take fancy offices to practice production and make solid games. Nor should it need over a quarter million dollars to open a space and allow it to become a sustainable gamedev environment.

There will be other LA Game Spaces.

Y’all tripping with this shit. No one is arguing that crunch is cool. It just fucking happens. Because that’s how it goes with game development. And life.

Let’s take a look at history: first video game ever made, 1958. October 1958. 60 years ago.

The instrumentation group had a small analog computer that could display various curves, including the path of a bouncing ball, on an oscilloscope. It took Higinbotham only a couple of hours to conceive the idea of a tennis game, and only a few days to put together the basic pieces.

“only a few days”. The dude crunched. Highly likely. Another one about the birth of the Amiga:

Miner and his team built their chipset, destined eventually to be miniaturized and etched into silicon, out of off-the-shelf electronics components, creating a pile of breadboards large enough to fill a kitchen table, linked together by a spaghetti-like tangle of wires, often precariously held in place with simple alligator clips. It had no keyboard or other input method; the software team wrote programs for it on a workstation-class 68000-based computer called the Sage IV, then uploaded them to the Lorraine and ran them via a cabled connection. The whole mess was a nightmare to maintain, with wires constantly falling off, pieces overheating, or circuits shorting out seemingly at random. But when it worked it provided the first tangible demonstration of Miner’s extraordinary design. Amiga accordingly packed it all up and transported it — very carefully! — to Las Vegas for its coming-out party at Winter CES.

TL;DR: they worked their asses off –building a damn new computer with new architecture- to get a barely-working hardware demo out in order to get financing going to *actually* build the Amiga. That’s so, so wild. Obviously, no crunch at all.

Another big example and I’ll stop there:

Nintendo. Super Mario 64. First ever 3D Mario. First prototype five years before the game came out. Nintendo for the first time, was not building their own chips, they were using Silicon Graphics (SGI) and MIPS stuff. They were making their flagship Mario game for a new console using 2 very different CPUs from a US company that they had kind of just met. It was a fucking nightmare of complexity: they were developing Mario on a supercomputer, hoping that SGI would be on time to ship the real console components. Hoping. While trying to make a great game they –and no one- had ever done right before: a true 3D platformer.

Super Mario 64 is one of the most important game ever made. And an absolutely excellent game. I’m sure they didn’t crunch at all. They went to bed early, took naps every day when they felt like it. Laughing and having fun.

Y’all are annoying. Crunch happens. I crunched for 3 days to finish my stupid Twine game because if you don’t do more trying to wrap it up, you can go on endlessly. That’s what happens with game development. That’s the fucking curse. Nothing is ever done in a digital world and it feels like you can always tweak. There are always some shit you can tweak. In the real world at some point it feels done. Never in the world of computer games (music production is the closest in terms of endlessness).

But also Jesus, crunch is fucking everywhere: people shipping rockets crunch. Nurses at the ER crunch. Folks building cars crunch when they’re expected to produce [number] of cars a week. Amazon workers will crunch like crazy in a few weeks. You think your favorite show/movie is made with 9-5 people? Your own mom probably crunched a million times because of you. It’s not healthy, that’s not the fucking point.

The point is that it happens and you need to go through it, do whatever you can so that it doesn’t happen again and it still will happen. We can also chill and nothing will ever come out of chilling forever. At some point you need to go hard to get shit done. Period.

It’s more the case with game development than anything else because there is no rules in game development. No standard way of doing things. If people crunch in fields where we know exactly how to make the sausage, imagine in a field where we don’t know and never will because every single game is made differently and knowledge is barely shared (NDA, NDA). Crunch will more than likely happen.

You shake your head and you do it. Because you care. Because of the sink-cost fallacy. Because you need to pay the bills. Whatevs. In the end the game is out and you feel better. Then you move on with your life. Nothing’s perfect. But shipping something you’re proud of, is a hell of a drug.

So I have access to an iPad Air now. I haven’t played games on iOS in ages. Years. So I went to the App Store, thinking, “oh my god, it’s going to be full of amazing games I don’t know about”.

In the top 30 there are pretty much the exact same games as on my dead as hell Windows Phone app store. LMFAO. Subway Riders, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds and a sea of match-3 games. Super addictive pool games like I was playing on my phone in 2011. I’m silently wheezing.

What’s sad to me is that the polishing level hasn’t increased at all. It’s all meh or bad. Not even sound on Hole.io, a top free game that could have awesome sound effects but only serves you with loud commercials every time you lose. The complete lack of care, goddamn.

Also holy fuck the spam and constant pull to make you download other apps and in-app purchases is unreal. I’m not surprised kids buy stuff in seconds. And then you grind for 68 hours. And then give up, ashamed at the pointless shit you’ve been tapping on on repeat for months. Gaming on tablets is bizarre.

I’m blown away by the legendary super good and so much better Apple app store I guess.

The experience of working through the stages of a solution, getting a little closer each time, is almost indescribably satisfying for anyone with the slightest hint of a tinkering spirit. The Incredible Machine wasn’t explicitly pitched as an educational product, but, like a lot of Sierra’s releases during this period, it nevertheless had something of an educational — or at least edutational — aura, what with its bright, friendly visual style and nonviolent premise (the occasional devoured mouse excepted!).

Man. Not only this game was fantastic and refreshing, it was very well executed. I enjoyed playing it in the evening after an afternoon fighting bad guys on consoles at my friends’ house. I would go back home and launch this puzzle feast where instead of following rules, there was none, outside the physic-based world emulated in The Incredible Machine (TIM).

I have a strong memory of feeling that TIM (and Lemmings, and Shufflepuck Café) was showing me that computer games could be absolutely anything. TIM was one of those games that made me want to be part of a development team. So much excitement from the game and the prospect of making games, firing up people’s synapses.

It thus manages to succeed as both a goal-oriented game in the mode of Lemmings and as a software toy in the mode of its 1980s inspirations.

Exactly!! Do I miss this from games. That agency. That scalability. People talk about markets, and how TIM was casual. It really doesn’t mean anything to me: you could have been playing hardcore TIM, building absurdly complex machines for hours on end. You could just try to finish a level before dinner. I’m in love with the idea of games being scalable to different lives and different people.

I feel like this is the right (and really hard) thing to do.

I love Ron Gilbert. I still have to play Thimbleweed Park but the development blog has been a delight for anyone wondering how games are made.

Ron Gilbert is more than just a veteran game developer. He is a designer and a programmer with over FORTY years of experience making games. There are not a lot of people alive right now that match that vast amount of game development knowledge.

And yet, he underestimated the audio/sound aspect of his last game. I’m not bashing him, I’m glad he talked about it in this blog post. But my #gameaudio mind is like “this “we care about sound” but we do the exact opposite of caring about sound bullshit again”.

It’s a constant with most programmers: they adore tackling tasks from the ground and do them on their own. “A sound engine? That’s NOTHING. It’s just streaming audio data, volume curves up and down, fades. LOL. It’s NO-THING.”

And then, most of the times, it’s not nothing. It’s big, complex and viscious. Programmers then sweat and ruminate like bovines.

His designer mind should have taken over to tell him “think long term, you idiot ego. Delegate.” It’s true that FMOD and Wwise are a bit overkill feature-wise for a lot of games. The price can also be an issue. But for instance FMOD brings you a game audio engine that’s been tested and approved by thousands of games over twenty years, that has become a standard for game audio designers around the world in the past two decades. It shouldn’t be discarded that fast. It’s a bit maddening that it’s not sort of common sense for experienced people like Ron. Let’s be blunt: it’s totally maddening. I know the parallel is not perfect but imagine a movie director being like “yeah you make the sound using that? It’s an industry standard? Well we won’t use that. We don’t know yet what we will use, but not that”. That’s plain weird.

What are we doing?

If you care about your game, think and work with sound as early as possible. Hire game audio designers. Trust them. Let them iterate like you are, early on. Spend some bucks on the audio stack, even if you don’t see why. You’ll hear it soon, and that will make an entire difference (think about Zelda:BOTW).

Sound and computers. We went from no sound to beep to unlimited sounds. Technically. On the development side, we went from being sort of straightforward to being an insane mess.

Please framework developers, listen: I should be able to loop a sound in browsers, game engines and apps without doing anything special. It’s 2018 and I have to do something special (hack and test and hack and test) for something ultra-basic: play a file on action (click) or loop an audio file seamlessly. So:

1. No more container

I don’t want to have to deal with this anymore. 18 years of that shit. One container that allows looping and multi-channel and this motherfucker works everywhere, forever. Like a damn wav file on Windows (reading those effortlessly since 1991, 27 years ago).

2. Basic stuff first

One shot and gapless loop, regardless of the lossy/lossless compression. I don’t care if we kill mp3 to do gapless loop. I don’t care if we need John Carmack and the best engineers in the world to solve this problem. GAPLESS AUDIO NOW, SON. A computer should be able to do that with a stream of audio data. Like a damn wav file on Windows (looping those effortlessly since 1991, 27 years ago).

Clicking a button and playing a sound should be part of HTML5 and shouldn’t require anything else to work. We should be able to do something like:

<a href=”new page”>

    <img src=”button.png” snd src=”woohoo.ogg”>

</a>

Where I click on a button to go to a new page and it plays a sound. It shouldn’t be harder than that. It is though.

Looping some music/ambience in the background and playing a sound on action are the most basic things, yet they are super powerful. But we sound designers and artists spend more time making this work than we should. People give up on this hot mess.

Don’t develop a 3D positioning system, a music system, a FFT analyzer or an ambisonic Web eXperience before solving those 2 crucial points and making them standards that audio people can rely on, natively (so yes, no libs ffs).

In the DAW world, we went from converting files to import them through drop-down menus to drag and dropping ANY kind of audio file in the timeline. That’s the kind of improvement that makes everyone a lot more productive and ultimately creative. We should be able to do that with interactive/game audio. Design your audio file, put it in the folder BAM it plays anywhere, you don’t even have to test that. It’s native, built-in. It’s a wrap.

We have that clarity with this terrible file system called Portable Document File. PDFs are readable everywhere. If you send a document to someone as a .pdf, you know this person will be able to read it on his/her device exactly like you do on your computer. Isn’t that pleasant? It’s dope.

Can we please have that with interactive and game audio, without libs or middleware? It’s definitely overdue.

Thank you.

About our weird fetichism. The perfect examples of Japanese people getting shit done and not caring about “art”:

The PS1 startup sound is a preset from a 1987 Roland synthesizer (D-50).

PaRappa on PS4 is running on a PSP emulator.

A lot of comments are like “those developers are lazy!” No. They make shit happen. You wanted a cool startup sound for your groundbreaking new console? Done. It took almost 20 years for us to know that they didn’t spend months on it. It’s still an iconic sound and yes, people making synthesizer presets are extremely underrated. They are worldwide-known anonymous artists.

You wanted to play PaRappa with HD textures right now? There you go. Do you know how insanely pesky it is to port something from a 1994 architecture to a 2013 one that has nothing in common?

We in the West need to do the same: focus on creating things that work more than trying to outwit ourselves for outwitting purposes. We fall in this trap too often. Don’t reinvent. Recycle, twist and move on.