h. Play

Start of a game development.

Game audio designer: Need some music?

Game developer: Fuck your music, I need sweet ass SFXs baby!

Game audio designer: Sure! Can I make some for you?

Game developer: Fuck no I’m fine with free samples, free is good for now.

Fine.

End of game development.

Game developer: DAMN I’M BURNING.

Game audio designer: still need some SFXs?

Game developer: YES, NO, MAYBE, PROBABLY, DEFINITELY.

Game audio designer: maybe some music too?

Game developer: NO, YES, NOT SURE, FUCK YOUTUBE KILLED MY TRAILER I NEED ORIGINAL MUSIC YESTERDAY.

 

You should stop seeing game audio people as vultures trying to make some paper on your back dear game developers, we’re all in this together. Whatever the project size, you’ll need audio. You’ll need someone to do it/deal with it, very quickly. Embrace it. Become professional in your output and dev process. Reduce the scope of visuals and pay attention to audio if needed, the resulting layer of polish will be more than worth it.

We are going toward a world of fanless computers as phones and tablets are showing us. It’s all about the Experience.

Audio is not an option, it’s required.

Awesome article from Greg Costikyan and yet, a bit obvious right? It says a lot that we need to discuss how to be ethical with F2P games when the main advantage for developers is sustainability of their jobs which translates into not screwing over users. How would you be against that? I don’t know but I’m glad that the word is out and generates comments. Because F2P is an important business model, not just for games. It’s getting better.

But I tend to prefer the “Pay Once, Play Forever” model discussed in a Jason Rohrer blog post on game pricing, the race to the bottom in app stores, to the back to back Steam sales and super lucrative bundles.

Jason wants to get money on day one because it makes sense when you’re working on a game over a couple of years. The simple fact that we in the industry feel that it’s normal to go on and on without revenue is crazy. Also, “free” means assholes trolling you and making you feel miserable after some hard work. We see those comments on app stores all the time.

Games doing well with this POPF business model (Minecraft, Terraria, Garry’s mod) all share something though: they’re almost like tools. They are not just games, they let people create and make stuff. That’s very interesting because not only those games are ethical in their pricing, they also allow their users to not just grind or escape, but build and design things.

It means that once you have your game core concept pretty solid, a prototype, you should think about how to monetize that shit while being fair to both you and the user. You need to balance out your evilness and it’s a pretty cool game in itself.

Perfectly said. So if I am building something it pretty much has to have sound. Sometimes I see the audio designer like a costume designer in games. We dress games sonically and it gives them everything they don’t have without sound: a life, a vibe (any game without audio feels desperately flat) and of course excitement. As costume designers, nobody gives a damn about our work.

This is why it makes me cringe when I see developers using SFXR for every-thing, even when it doesn’t match the game at all. I mean at this point with seasoned developers it’s just offensive: respect audio, behind the go big with sound because it’s part of making a game polished there’s the need to understand sound and be able to set up audio placeholders as much as with visuals. Learn how to communicate about sound, get some serious understanding of audio. Learn to determine your game audio intention, not the technical 3D part, don’t worry about that. You need to have a sonic idea of your game as much as you have a visual one.

If programming takes so much resource that we deliberately cut the audio out of the equation very early on, it means that programming needs to get simpler or better so that it doesn’t happen. We made a lot of progress but it’s still a massive problem with prototyping.

It was bad. Not just business wise but as Raph Koster points out in his blog post:

But this was the year when an editor at a games publication actually said to me “stop writing.” This was the year that the metaphors of violence were the most popular way to describe what we should be doing to each other’s life work and passions. Burning down. Destroying.

The game industry in 2013 felt like that to me too.

I’m a game developer and reading that an editor at a games publication can actually say “stop” to someone who contributes to the game design community as much and as hard as Raph does (and when people minimize that I just think STFU you don’t know shit), says it all. Something is super rotten in the game industry. I don’t know how to react except prototyping on my own and reading arguments.

I’m a game audio designer and all I heard about all year long was audio implementation and 3D sound and HDR and things that are absolutely not core to a great game audio experience. Tons of games don’t use that at all and have great audio. Needs for more audio interactivity and flexibility are shared by all my peers in the field and yet, nothing changes. We use the same inherently broken audio stream design. It’s been a while now. Like over a goddamn decade. It became taboo.

We like to remind ourselves of how a couple of people pretty much had solutions to seamless, atomic game audio end 80s or how Nintendo masters game audio design since Mario but the game industry is not about mentors or spreading knowledge, it’s about being violently childish (Fmod vs Wwise yay). Back to Raph being humiliated online, back to Chris Crawford –kind of the father of us all, amirite- treated like “fuck that old weird dude”. Back to that article where professional game developers can’t wrap their heads around the idea of people having fun driving a cleaning truck in a simulation. I don’t know, jumping on platforms for 30 years seems pointless to me too and also, your mom albeit being old is still a ton of fun. You get the point, to each his own. Good designers know that. They analyze, they don’t laugh at taste or worse, bully you (super condescending title, Gamasutra) because you don’t play the last AAA or the last indie darling. There is no hierarchy in games, it’s like music.

Anyway, a lot of people profit that situation of intellectual stagnation and game design idling. From that editor to Raph to guys selling sound banks and focusing on how important having $50K worth of microphones will change your game audio forever, it’s not about games. It’s about business and I’m just as naive as ever: if we move on, their business will fail. If tomorrow someone comes up with a cheap, responsive audio engine that does what games need and not what sound people want Fmod and Wwise would bleed.

Computer games complexity is such that a lot of people are living out of it, without asking the good questions or caring about where it goes, what we can do with them. The mutation is slow. I blame rent and living wages.