Ready to eat some braiiiins
Categories
Categories
Goddamn
The other day I just tweet-censured myself:
“Maybe I shouldn’t have add "Black/Afro-American Male" in some form this morning. "Other" would’ve been better http://okcupid.com/z/2v”
Saw these stats/facts from SexActu. So annoying to see what I felt. So annoying to censured myself in the real-time blogging realm. Just because I don’t want to be seen as the angry/whiny black man. Because it’s another bad thing society-wise you know.
But yeah, nothing new actually. That is maybe the worse part.
To White people who could be offended by such statistics, I would just say to you something I’ve learned from Dave Chappelle here:
Calm down motherfuckers, you win by default.
Categories
Game band
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.
Categories
Speechless
I have one problem with music: lyrics. I can’t really listen to them. Sometimes I cam hum every single instrument of the song, know every note triggered and yet being totally unable to sing some simple english I have listen to a gazillion time.
“That’s weiird”
Though I always found that french was not a really good language to sing with, even young and listening to french stuff I could not pay attention or care about it. Learning song lyrics by heart was annoying for me.
Music first. I automatically focus on music you know, the background noise that make lyrics shine. So much difference between being before, not understanding at all what is going on to now, where i can dissect almost any complex piece of music and give you the name of that synth or see the waveform in my head. Mmmh ADSR..
Problem is lyrics from songs are a big part of pop culture. I could not sing anything, except what I did search and learn patiently making myself, karaoke-wise, a pure disaster.
I do learn some from time to time, well after digging the music of course.
“Hey wait, what is he/she saying? Let me see from what I feel with the music”
Now that I did that for a couple of years, I think what I like the most in lyrics is canevas of ideas, not stories. I’d rather have some EW&F:
“Celebrate, change your thoughts to love
Celebrate, what you’re thinking of
Time ain’t long, soon we’ll be moving on,
Moving on…”
than some DJ Quik:
“This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you
This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you”
Ok it’s a bit extreme but I took this example because in both case I appreciate the music. But I can’t sing something as shitty as a fake sexy-porn story. Sorry, I’d rather do it for real.
I think it’s not just coming from the fact that I do music. I was not at 5/6 –well barely starting- and I can’t say that I hate words, I always loved to read.
Sorry mermaid, it.does.not.work
I think it has to do with mind independence.
Having someone telling me a story 10 000 times, with the same tone, the same manner, the same words is not something I search for. Actually this is something that my brain fight against because it knows how speech is powerful. Reading is my own voice. I can interpret, do what I want.
I know it’s a bit of paranoia and autism that I experience. It’s underneath, I can’t control that. It’s like if I can’t make the audio speech mine, if I can’t relate deeply, it just goes from one ear to the other.
Or the opposite: with sad lyrics it’s really easy to feel the same. I can’t sing I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. Hell no. I know I am a weirdo, no need to accentuate that by singing it hundreds of time! You just have to search “creep” to find the Radiohead song, first result. Scary.
I would not say that lyrics make people do stuffs. It’s just that they’re part of the culture and if a song can change the world in a good way, hundreds of them storytelling gangbang with whores for entire generations of men, cannot not have an impact. The impact is the glue that makes them so slow to move on but this is not the subject. Gladys Knight is right.
I listen to the singing melody, not the lyrics. I listen to it musically –voice grain, rhythm, flow-. This is what I love with some hip-hop songs, I don’t give a shit about what the dude says –bragging stories, nostalgia blabla- but the voice is so greatly part of the sound that I can loop it over and over. Now that’s a musician behavior.
Anyway, this all thing is socially impairing to me. But surfing this ocean of sounds is so good.
Categories
BombHman
This year I told myself that I would take any opportunities in front of me and that it would be the year I exploded. Whatever it means.
Et on reprend les bonnes habitudes..
I moved to L.A. found an oustanding partner and am so ready to push it hard, doing audio like crazy. I miss some tools, they’re on their way. After three months without producing new content, without my dear 5.1 that makes me want no tv no movies no nothing because sound is all I need, I’m frea-king starving.
Years and thousands of hours of the same routine stopped temporarily, some important details to solve, money flying by no doubt why I did get back smoking cigarettes. Damn it, I should stop already.
I have to shut down ideas in my brain because I can’t realize them. As you know ideas are cheap, making and finish them is what is hard and all about.
The production of SideFlip the iPhone game I’m working on didn’t go very well. Too much experience of what we should fix and go for first, not enough experience of managing people, especially without contracts and just trust from words. Eventually it’s gonna be out soon (we’re in beta).
I did the 8 mn original music, all audio fxs, design 20+ puzzles –some I can’t solve now!-, manage the consistency and ergonomy of the GUI, report bugs and all that boring stuff but I failed at making it happen in time. Like says my friend Sean Bonner I’m just shit at providing structure to people I work with. I want to get better at it. Or find people who don’t need it.
Anyway some music from me is gonna be featured in Boxgame by Sophie Houlden, the internet game of the month in Edge magazine next month! I can’t wait. Oh and play it, it really is a fun platform-puzzle game.
I did not explode yet but the fuse is burning steadily.
Categories
Audio and visual are the same coin
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.
Categories
I want a skip button too
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.
Categories
3D freedom my ass
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!
Categories
Contrast and mirror
Family time.
During that time, August in Paris makes you believe that the capital is at least half black, half asian demonstrating who can go on vacation, sort of. It makes me feel bad that my white friend after four years in China seeing that too is feeling “invaded” while at the same time he loves black pussies.
And then I see angry young black men at la Def. Usual stuff for a suburb parisian like me. Never had relation with french black communities. Not nerd enough for me I guess.
In L.A. it’s different. Black people are quite rare where I live but they all share the streets and card boxes. A large part that I saw for now are homeless or poor with shitty jobs. Last night I paid a vegan taco to a big black man with a guitar before he did go to Mc Donalds.. “Black man.. Guitar..”
They all have this “sympathy by default” bro’ thing with me, always smiling with the classic “how’s it going?” coming out from their mouth shortly after. Sometimes I want to talk and share.
Then of course there’s Barack the Boss. Health care debate on TV. Openness.
And then I read that, here’s an excerpt:
“People of all races got sucked into subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase loans as low-income whites — even when they qualified for prime mortgages, even when they offered down payments.”
Something that follow the analysis of the End of Work which explain how technology has killed millions of jobs for minorities since half a century:
“In October 1944 the first mechanical cotton picker was successfully demonstrated in the Mississippi delta.vIt could pick 1000 pounds of cotton an hour, thereby doing the work of 50 seasoned pickers. 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically; by 1964 it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines.
More than 5 million blacks migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline.”
“In the mid-1950s, automation began taking its toll in the nation’s manufacturing sector,” he wrote. “Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in industries where black workers were concentrated. Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million blue-collar jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector. While the unemployment rate for black Americans had never exceeded 8.5 percent between 1947 and 1953 and the white rate of unemployment had never gone beyond 4.6 percent, by 1964, blacks were experiencing an unemployment rate of 12 percent while white unemployment was only 5.9 percent.”
It seems like the economic race is always lost twice as much by the same people. For no reason. Just History and slow progress.
I’m fortunate enough to be in the tiny knowledge and high profile economy,I’m lucky enough but I know that without my unique experience and “white legacy”, I would probably not be here. It hurts. It fuels me too.
In the game industry where there’s less than 2% of black people (yeah, less than women can you imagine?), it’s just not the representation of western societies today. Didn’t see a change in ten years. On the consumer side of it, I read that and I feel sad that people just don’t get the solution (Valve totally got it with L4D, Sega totally got it with Streets of Rage in 19 fucking 91) and get angry instead. And sure thing is, there is never been a time more multi-cultural than now.
These gigantic contrasts between what I live and what I see around me, what should work and doesn’t make me contemplate all that shit. I’m in the middle. No sides, nothing to say except that everybody’s to blame. Not very useful.
Also, there’s the fastest man ever. Coming from the country more known for its slow tempo music and slow motion grass. You can’t invent that.
Sometimes I want his legs. I want to run. Run away from you, society you are so slow! I want the Future Now.
Categories
Nerdy choices
Watching everything that goes on in the tech and computer world –well as much as I can-, here some thoughts.
Just so nobody can’t say nothin’
Closed/Open technologies and monopole.
It’s an endless loop I guess. Usually at first we use the closed ones because they are better and when the technology is mature enough –when people really need it while the tech reaches stability- we move to alternatives to the point where we’re almost totally free to use this technology seeminglessly and endlessly. And then a new closed tech comes etc
So there’s nothing wrong using closed tech. Opera offers a great browser experience and it’s a closed tech. The only thing to do with closed technologies is to not giving up everything on them. Using them to get things done and have a boost of productivity is fine.
Adobe Flash is an excellent example of a great productivity tool for which we tend to give up everything, building a monopole based on a proprietary technology where only a giant company like MS can compete with (Silverlight). But Flash is cool –though not as fast as the Grandmaster-, it is used by visual designers. They are the coolest guys of the entire universe they can’t be wrong!
That’s weird. The stability of the open source alternative should be here and competing. I can’t wait to have the open source equivalent of the PDF format, without any restriction and gazillion of devices capable of reading it while offering perfect performances, feeding great apps.
I see some people complaining about the monopole of iTunes these days and people going away from a market so tightly controlled by the California based company that apps are refused arbitrary.
Well, Apple is known for that –just having to install iTunes to see the music catalog is the first step-, it’s closed closed closed. The size of the iphone market is now enough to make people think twice before being stuck.
It’s like the cooler you seem, the more you can fuck people. Open or closed technology doesn’t even count. That’s why I don’t want Chrome. Way too nice Google, and you already have me with mail and rss.
OS/Apps and updates.
They all fail at some point. Whatever it is, from Snow Leopard to WordPress to Windows, a major update on a major system has to break some stuffs. That’s why 7 is impressive for me, it didn’t break anything and everything worked out out of the box on three very different computer. Because doing an operating system is one of the most complex task in the world, sometimes it doesn’t deliver. Hopefully it’s less and less the case whatever the flavor of what is running your computer on.
Also the more the app is used, the more it’s vulnerable and needs updates. WordPress and Firefox come in mind. It’s just like that. And no system is unbreakable so.. All this noise on news about what is normal in the software world is pretty annoying because during that time, they don’t talk about great apps and services that would be worth the word.
Patents & lock-in.
Well, I agree with Raph Koster on this one. You have a great idea, you did work hard on it, it seems fair that you want some revenue from it. The point is to what degree. It seems that people always want to abuse that, largely. The lack of competition because of abusive patents especially on hardware is slowing the spread of progress so hard (multitouch mess).
Anyway the only way to prevent abuses or slow generalization of great tech things seems to make sure to be in the middle of it. No sides, just going here and there, getting the one that fits your need without compromising your freedom.