sonofableep

my approach to design docs seems to be this: as thoughts occur to me, scribble ‘em on post-its & napkins, type ‘em into one-off text files & docs, scrawl ‘em on the nearest whiteboard…and promptly forget where i scribbled / typed / scrawled everything.  then when critical mass is reached – when the time has come for all the relevant information to be in one place, vetted, updated, easily referenced and ready for implementation – i’ve got to spend a day or three tracking down all those scraps of knowledge and clumping them into a whole, like so many stray bits of play-doh.

it’s a funny thing being the guy who writes up a design then turns around and implements it.  the docs are filled with slang and in-jokes only for me, plenty of obscenities and even more spelling & grammatical atrocities, and generally smack of unprofessionalism.  sometimes i wonder why i bother writing them up at all.

oh yeah.  because i’m the sole keeper of lots and lots information, and if i got hit by a bus tomorrow – splat! – all that wonderful info would be gone – poof!  so, today is document day.  turn up the caffeine, turn down the grindcore, and commence concentrating.

so, i’m finding after years of doing things one way, it’s hard to suddenly shift gears and do them another way.  hard to believe, right?

i spent roughly eight years working with a particular sound system that shall remain nameless…mostly because it had no name.  it was a hodge-podge of this-n-that built up over the years on top of a basic off-the-shelf API.  and over those eight years, its features and limitations, its methodology, and its fundamental approach to The Way Things Work became second nature to me.  but that all changed six months ago when i started working with a different sound system.

hey, it’s all good – within a month of kickin’ it new school i came to wonder how i ever kicked it old school for so long.  but i still haven’t shaken off the last of the old school assumptions, it seems.  every so often i just…can’t…seem to grasp how something works in the here-and-now, because it would have been so completely *impossible* to do in the there-and-then.  it takes a lot of careful RTFM-ing on my part, or somebody smarter than me explaining it in 3rd-grade english, before the light bulb goes off over my head.

i’ll get there.  hopefully without looking / feeling like an idiot too many more times.  in the meantime – and in a very similar “looking like an idiot until you get the hang of it” vein – i’m learning to ollie so i can skateboard with my kids.  i’m pretty sure that’ll land me in more trouble than my occasional lapses in comprehension on the job…

sometimes warm gooey double chocolate chip cookies fresh from the company kitchen are just the thing to spur me on to another four hours of enthusiastic dev time, just when i was just about to call it a day.  i smell a nefarious corporate conspiracy…and it smells bloody delicious.

here’s a position i’m not used to being in: engineering waiting on *me*, instead of the other way around.  thanks to the current state of tools & pipeline stuff around here, there’s no more of me going “hey i need to do / want to try something guys!  so, ah, get back to me when you’ve done your half of the work”, and then drumming my fingers on my desk as the weeks go by, waiting to hear back.  now it’s more “hey i need to do / want to try something guys!  so, ah…oh really?  this afternoon?  er, i won’t be done with my half of the work by then…”.

which is awesome.  cuz for better or for worse, all kinds of whims and fancies of mine can be tried out as fast as i can dream them up and puke out sound / music for them.  and if it turns out to be a non-starter, /shrug and move on.  but if it’s a Win, huzzah!  time to iterate and polish the bejesus out of it.

funny thing is, those week-long finger-drumming sessions were the times when i could bear down on something requiring multi-day focus, like writing a piece of music.  now, it’s never a moment’s rest.  guess i’m going to have to start thinking up harder stuff for engineering to engineer, so i’ll be left alone to work in peace.  :)

man, returning to work after my good long vacation feels like coming out of a coma.  even though i cheated and did check my email whilst at the beach (as to not return to a mr. creosote-like inbox), it’s still taken me the better part of a monday to snap to.  i’ve been  responding to work-related questions with blank stares, eyes fixed in the middle-distance at some sand dune or cresting wave that only i can see.  docs & spreadsheets that were half-done when i left appear to have been written in some dead language, until i rub my eyes and blink a few times.  now, what the hell was i up to again?

but i’m coming around.  i remember my name, i know what year it is…the basics.  by tomorrow i should be a fully functional member of society again.  in the meantime i’ll F5 massively one more time to see what i missed while off the grid.

it’s my last day of work before a week-long vacation – *real* vacation, for a change.  not the vacations of years past, spent tied to a laptop & cell phone, editing audio or spreadsheets, troubleshooting this crisis or that.  and not the vacations that were cut short for “milestone emergencies”, or cancelled altogether for “impending gold master clusterfuckery”.  but an actual vacation where i might not think about work for a solid seven days.

well, that’s unlikely, since i’m *always* thinking about work.  but it’s conceivable that this time i won’t have to touch the laptop, and i won’t have to pick up the phone.  i won’t have to do anything but relax knowing that everything is under control back at the shop, the fridge in the game room is well-stocked, and we’ve got a spare bottle opener.

cue Don-Ho.  isson.

weeks like this remind me just how bitchin’ it is to make games for living.  hard to believe i have to be reminded of such a thing, yeah?  but like any constant in one’s life, it *can* get taken for granted once in awhile.  so with fresh eyes, let’s take a look at the highlights from my week, shall we?

• rolled into work every day dressed like an 8th-grader (circa 1980 *or* 2009, take your pick).
• played video games on the clock.
• recorded people saying silly things into a microphone.
• sat around talking about video games.
• got two free t-shirts and one free console game.
• played video games ’til 4am more than once.
• partook (with marginal restraint) of the free soda, pretzels, lucky charms, donuts, etc.
• laughed to the brink of tears more than once.
• inched our game a little bit closer to greatness.  aka “did my job”.

so, note-to-self: when the going gets rough (setbacks, crunch times, etc.) if ever tempted to bitch, let’s not forget what a typical week on the job really consists of…and the fact that the worst day on this job is better than the best day on most.

so i open my shiny new sound effects library from xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com (name withheld until i get this whole mess sorted out), all excited to install it and get to work…but the blush came off that rose a-mighty quick.  two words: “fucking quality control”.

first of all, last time i ordered this exact same library, it came on audio CDs.  swell, no problem.  i ripped ‘em, the metadata was preserved, and i was up and running in no time.  but this go-round, what had been ~50 audio CDs is now 10 data DVDs.  well…DVD-Rs.  well…DVD-Rs still in their “maxell” jewel boxes with their “maxell” jewel tray liners.  ooooooookay…i guess we’re taking some cost-cutting measures over at xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com, fine, no problem, it doesn’t really matter.  let’s just get the data off these suckers and onto my rig.

the data won’t come off those suckers and onto my rig.  not without a fight anyway.  in the end it takes countless attemps that hang my machine, dozens of reboots, and the use of four different PCs with four different DVD drives to successfully go “ctrl-c” and “ctrl-v” for the whole mess.  but at least i’ve got all the data now.

i don’t have all the data now.  thanks to completely assinine filenaming, it’s hard to even tell what i’m looking at.  but a subset of files that contain strings like “~1.wav” appended to the ends of those assinine names catches my attention, and i soon realize that a) they’re redundant clones of existing sounds, and b) during the DVD creation process, the generation of those clones OVERWROTE OTHER VALID FILES.  in short, i’m missing files.  how many?  which ones?  ya got me.  well, maybe i can at least work with what i’ve got.

in the course of working with what i’ve got, i find that about 1 out of every 100 sounds has been converted to mono, without any apparent logic, rhyme, or reason.  not because the original source material was mono or any clever thing like that.  just…because…i don’t know why.

now i’ve got to get on the horn and see if somebody over there will kindly just send me the audio CDs that this stuff shipped on years ago.  so much for “progress”.

ah, another day in the ongoing struggle to reconcile “writing good music” with “writing music that works in the game”.  a struggle made more difficult when that game music is “interactive” and “dynamic” and “other buzz words”.

to focus too much on the “good music” part is to compose with reckless artistic abandon, writing whatever works musically with nary an eye toward how it will ultimately get integrated into the game.  this is a recipe for big headaches down the road, like when composers-for-hire happily write a bunch of music, get paid, walk away, and leave it to the devs to work out all the tricky stuff.

but focus too much on the “works in the game” part, and you run the risk of not so much writing music, but satisfying a list of requirements…checking things off a checklist.  “in order to dovetail with the design, this piece needs to be in *this* style, be *this* long, have *this* many sections and *this* many variants of each, at *this* tempo, in *this* key, meet *these* filesize requirements, and be linear enough to sound composed but non-linear enough to take into account that we never truly know what the player will do next”.  piece of cake.  piece of twelve-layer-nearly-impossible-to-create-and-then-transport wedding cake.

hey wait…we own ID now.  maybe i’ll just borrow some of those old DOOM midi files.  while that may not actually solve the problem at hand, it would certainly bring great joy!

so, i’m playing Aion the other night and my audio cohort / coworker / codependent is looking over my shoulder.  his ears perk up whilst i’m merrily grinding along, “hey, go back to that one spot.  i recognize that music!”  so i wander around a little bit until the music in question returns.  “yeah…yeah!  that’s an ACID loop!  i thought i knew that thing!  here…hold on a sec…” and with that he disappears into his office.

moments latter this link appears in my IM, and he comes running back in.  “that’s it, right?”  and sure enough, that’s it.  an off-the-shelf music loop from a free-with-purchase CD has found its way into Aion.

most people would probably wonder what the big deal is, and unless you’ve achieved a certain level of snobbery in your musical outlook (a level of snobbery which i surpassed years ago, i’m forced to admit), it’s really *not* a big deal.  i mean, whomever was responsible for putting together the score for that game had a Big Job to do, and they used whatever tools were at their disposal to do it.  on the other hand, i can’t help feeling like we just discovered somebody’s dirty little secret…like finding out the artists used free clip art for a few of the inventory icons, or some other silly hypothetical like that.

i have a feeling from now on when i’m playing, my ears will be tuned into the music more than ever, but for the wrong reasons – i’ll be listening for more of that sonic clip art and hollering “gotcha!” when i find it.  :)