{"id":2636,"date":"2018-07-16T18:03:40","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T18:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=2636"},"modified":"2018-07-16T18:03:40","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T18:03:40","slug":"there-are-tools-use-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2018\/07\/there-are-tools-use-them\/","title":{"rendered":"There are tools. Use them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love Ron Gilbert. I still have to play Thimbleweed Park but the <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.thimbleweedpark.com\/\">development blog has been a delight<\/a> for anyone wondering how games are made.<\/p>\n<p>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. <strong>There are not a lot of people alive right now that match that vast amount of game development knowledge<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, he underestimated the audio\/sound aspect of his last game. I\u2019m not bashing him, I\u2019m glad he talked about it in this <a href=\"https:\/\/grumpygamer.com\/penny_wise\">blog post<\/a>. But my #gameaudio mind is like <em>\u201cthis \u201cwe care about sound\u201d but we do the exact opposite of caring about sound bullshit again\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a constant with most programmers: they adore tackling tasks from the ground and do them on their own. <em>\u201cA sound engine? That\u2019s NOTHING. It\u2019s just streaming audio data, volume curves up and down, fades. LOL. It\u2019s NO-THING.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And then, most of the times, it\u2019s not nothing. It\u2019s big, complex and viscious. Programmers then sweat and ruminate like bovines.<\/p>\n<p>His designer mind should have taken over to tell him <em>\u201cthink long term, you idiot ego. Delegate.\u201d<\/em> It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t be discarded that fast. It\u2019s a bit maddening that it\u2019s not sort of common sense for experienced people like Ron. Let\u2019s be blunt: it\u2019s totally maddening. I know the parallel is not perfect but imagine a movie director being like \u201cyeah you make the sound using that? It\u2019s an industry standard? Well we won\u2019t use that. We don\u2019t know yet what we will use, but not that\u201d. That\u2019s plain weird.<\/p>\n<p>What are we doing? <\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t see why. You\u2019ll hear it soon, and that will make an entire difference (think about Zelda:BOTW).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}