h. Play

Well, that made the headlines.

Money and roadmap wise, it makes sense. For so many other reasons, it’s super weird. Worrisome? We can only speculate.

Classic game developer paradox: Be angry at capitalism buying your favorite technology out but adore Nintendo, a capitalism champion. Anyway.

I’m more concerned about VR in itself, seen by a big part of the industry as the savior of the “videogame bastion”, where players get lost and forget about the real world. The Real Escapism.

To me, not including audio as part of the built-in experience is already a big design flaw (that they can now solve, thanks $$). But I have a bigger concern about Escapism. I think we need less of that, instead of more.

I feel like I want way more people playing on 7” to 70” tablets than having them plug VR sets. I feel like there’s still so much to do and bring to people before going nuts for something I have been dreaming of ever since the start of those helmets back in the early 90s. It’s not because I dreamed of how cool it could be that “it has to happen”. In today’s society, already battling a terrible plague of people incapable of not looking at their phones while talking to you, I think VR can wait a bit.

I want 2D. I want sharing. Collaboration, fair competition. Neat games, software, local services etc. I still want to empower people more than making them my bitch, my ultimate bitch with VR. VR is so far away in my head.

I want less excitement. I want people to chill. I want people to enjoy stuff, games, your game, my sound design, on devices that did not even exist a decade ago.

So much work to do. VR can wait.

It’s a nice post on game audio tools.

I’ll go ahead and say that I agree to totally disagree with that.

To me it’s a huge loss when tools are lost. We are not at war. There is no war. We build things. I repeat, we build games and game audio. The better toolset we have, the better teams can make cool stuff. The more we can share our tools, the better. The web industry shows it to us all the freaking time: a nifty WordPress –which is an open cms engine, right- plugin? 15 people show up on the website to make it better.

250,000 websites will use that stuff. Some will pay for extra features some will get the basic version. That’s awesome. That’s how game development should be if we want to thrive because development is hard. Reinventing the wheel is such a waste of time, we don’t need to have another audio engine that fades in/out audio streams which is why news of Fmod and Wwise going free for small projects is awesome. We need(ed) game audio tool standards and those two do a great job.

Starting from scratch without looking around is a mistake. First, to think that it hasn’t been done perfectly before you is kind of a dick move. And second, it is just smart to use the best tools available out there! It’s about creativity, not about how your tool looks like, how many files it can handle or how low you can get that CPU meter while manipulating complex reverb settings for a 3D room. Fmod designer has never been perfect but hell, how awesome it is to type a couple of lines of code, to have a sound designer doing his thing and tada, it works as best as it could while the focus on sound design aesthetic is maximum. I like it. I like it a lot. I like like it.

It’s very weird to me how game audio tries so hard to look “tech” as if we were jealous of 3D and its shaders. The microphone, that very simple and elegant technology mostly hasn’t evolved since its inception. It works perfectly, shitty ass electret mics can do miracles. Y’all know that any under $200 netbook can play 24bit/192KHz? Audio tech is awesomely low profile but we act like we have problems when we don’t. We have massive power. We lack smart tools.

A lot of games don’t have hundreds of sounds (outside voiceover). Hotline Miami has a very memorable game audio that doesn’t rely on HDR, 3D audio or 7.1 output. The need for game audio tools is not in the “more tech, more complexity” but in the “we should rethink the way it works today, was there a tool solving that?”. We don’t do that enough.

When we lose knowledge, tools, problems-which-were-solved-but-not-anymore-because-the-tool-is-dead, that’s bad for us. iMUSE did things that we can’t do with audio engines 15, 20 years later. That’s extremely bad for us. We feel the lack of audio flexibility in AAA games. We feel the weight of audio streams in mobile and mid-sized games.

I’ll go ahead and ask developers to release their audio tools, regardless. For The Love Of The Game, Yo. Let’s share and innovate.

Please fix your hiring practices. It’s a good one, I guess that we could extend to a lot of industries.

I feel the heat too, the more experience you have the weirder it is to sell it to an industry that relies a lot on fresh blood and specialization, the opposite of what veterans bring in.

And of course, experience  means more HR work to understand who this person is. Which means understanding game development at a pretty deep level, which is a difficult and bushy subject that HR people don’t really get into.

But as this excellent article says in three perfect points, it’s solvable if we think differently (nothing new here though):

The studio development model is broken. From an economic standpoint, studios are really just outsourced R&D for larger publishers. There are some exceptions—but for the most part, a studio exists to rapidly scale up an enormous development effort, ship a product, and then shed off unneeded staff quickly. While this model has succeeded at producing huge games like GTA 5, it is a lousy model for creating sustainable businesses for all but the very largest games. Big studio-developed titles usually don’t benefit from the creation of best practices, the institutional memory, or the perfection of craft that is acquired over the course of time.

And yes, game news are surprised when they see Irrational Games going out of business, which shows that game news don’t get it, and don’t care as long as majestic 3D is sprayed all over their retinas.

Unrealized profit potential. Games should be thought of as a type of service rather than a product to be thrown over the wall and handed off to marketers. Every game developed in the ship-it-and-forget-it vein has given up an opportunity to have the original developers continue to innovate and deliver value-creating entertainment experiences to the players who loved it over the long term.

I know right? This is where veterans shine and bring in experience. This is where those people get some stability instead of being fired at the end of the project in the studio development model right? Ten years ago I thought that MMOs and game as services would provide long term work and sustained development. When I see Disney laying off 700 people mostly from online operations last week, I realize that it’s because they still think with the old model, like the music industry with digital music they play with numbers and have some insane cash flow, so they just shift+delete those people’s jobs.

Developers and not just game developers, are pretty bad at business and don’t understand why they are treated as cogs most of the time. Except for one industry, the web. Which is one of the reason why Kentucky Route Zero, made by web guys, is so different.

The web industry changed a lot in ten years. The web changes all the time. Web developers think way more about long term, they know that it’s crucial in a world of tabs and immediate competition. There are plenty of great stories about small web businesses run by a team of two growing to healthy and pretty big companies. Web companies try and fail faster. The same in the game industry? We all look like one-hit wonder so it’s cool when it’s Minecraft, but otherwise it’s not great.

Anyway, I’m just the sound guy. Hire me.