last night i shed a little more upper range hearing bouncing around the pit at the lamb of god show. the ringing in my ears tells me i shouldn’t be doing any critical listening on the job just yet. this all seems vaguely familiar.
and this from the “it’s a small world / you reap what you sow / what comes around goes around / don’t shit where you eat” department: with the sudden availability of lots of game dev talent last week, it was a good bet that resumes would start to surface with some familiar names on them. and sure enough, they did. and it was also a good bet that i’d start getting some requests to “put in a good word”. and sure enough, i did. and when deserved, i did put in that Good Word.
funny…sometimes it seems like there’s only about 500 game devs in the world, and after awhile you end up working with each and every one of them, at least once. i mean, i’ve been doing this for long enough that my last interview consisted of a series of “hey man, good to see ya again!” handshakes as i went from office to office. call it nepotism, call it the cream rising to the top, call it unfair…whatever. fact is, once you’ve slogged through the crunch-time trenches, celebrated the launches, and suffered the layoffs with a group of people, you’re likely to be on their short list next time they’re hiring (provided, ya know, that you’re also really good at what you do).
so when your resume comes in, it goes one of three ways…
i’d like to think that’s more about the cream rising to the top, and less about some kind of good ol’ boys network that never forgets. nevertheless, i never take the last donut. just to be safe.
ah, it used to be so simple. you had an event in a game (weapon hits target!) and it generated a sound (bang!) and that was that.
now take that weapon, and multiply it by the number of possible weapon variants. then multiply that number by all the different objects & material types it might hit. then multiply that by all the possible sizes of struck objects. then multiply that by how many degrees of damage that hit might do. then multiply it by…i don’t know…what kind of shoes you’re wearing if you’re wielding the weapon on a tuesday. why not.
now our one “bang!” has become 8,192 bangs, give or take. because dammit, i, Sound Designer just can’t bear to *not* include any of those pieces of information in the decision logic for choosing an appropriate “bang!” sound. and because dammit, today’s tools give me enough rope to hang myself in just this fashion.
where i used to have only the one “bang!” event, i now *can* have 8,192. and where i used to make music on a 4-track cassette machine, now i use a 400 track DAW. my total alottment for audio in a given game used to be measured in megabytes; now it’s measured in gigabytes. the projects i worked on used to take months; now they take years. as externally imposed restrictions have been removed over time, internally imposed ones (also known as “design” or “common sense”) should be taking their place. c’mon now, do i really need 8,192 hit sounds?
my guess is, as soon as i task a sound designer with making those 8,192 sounds (oh yeah, that’s the other change: where i used to have to do all the work myself, now i get to delegate), that sound designer is going to say – with all due respect since i *am* his superior – “up yours”.
maybe we can make do with just 4,096.
1980′s : Kesmai sets about inventing online gaming as we know it. (fun trivia: kesmai.com was one of the first 100 domain names ever registered.)
1995 : i start making sounds for Kesmai. w00t!
1990′s : Mythic also commences doing a bang-up job with this whole internet gaming thing.
1997 : i start making sound for Mythic too, as Kesmai & Mythic form a collaborative relationship. w00t!
1999 : Electronic Arts purchases Kesmai as part of their “hey, the information superhighway sure is neat…let’s make a gaming portal” business plan. (fun trivia: this venture actually included the slogan “ready, fire, aim!” which was printed up on tons of t-shirts without apparent irony.)
2001 : Kesmai turns up murdered. from the condition of the body it’s evident that the victim was dismembered over a prolonged period before ultimately being killed in cold blood. (fun trivia: the killers were sentenced to large bonuses and some time away from the office, after which they returned and it was back to business as usual.)
2001 : i start working with Mythic full-time. w00t!
2006 : EA purchases Mythic as part of their “hey, MMOs are The Future…but we don’t know how to make them ourselves” business plan. (fun trivia: i was on suicide watch for a month after i got the news about the impending acquisition.)
2009 : with an air of “this is going to hurt us more than it hurts you”, the killers of a decade before begin dismembering Mythic, limb by limb. (fun trivia: Mythic was certainly not alone. EA’s longevity has been built on the corpses of scores of smaller studios, lured to their nondescript windowless van by the promise of sweet sweet candy…)
2009 : after the first limb is lopped off, i get the hell out of dodge. w00t?
2009 : i watch from afar, powerless, as Mythic’s prolonged dismemberment continues. (fun trivia: none.)
and so, for the third time in my career, i find myself at an awesome studio that is a) full of promise, b) full of talent, c) not owned by Electronic Arts. so hear this EA, you black-hearted bastard: keep the hell away from me!
damn. i came in today, all set to work on something…what was it? i can’t remember / it hardly matters now. because by 11am i was completely derailed and off on something else – a tangent that sent me down a rabbit’s hole of sequential tangents that has me still sitting here at 8pm on a friday night. good thing i’m a boring old fart, else i’d claim to have sexier things to be doing right now.
it started innocently enough (doesn’t it always?). fella wanted me to have a look at some animations, and make some decisions about what kind of audio i might be able to temporarily embed in them to liven up some combat prototypes. alright, cool. so, hm, should the guy do a “grunt” here, or not? well…if he does, that might conflict with him saying “oof” here, if the animations behave in a certain manner…but wait, didn’t i have an idea regarding just this sort of scenario…oh yeah, i’ve got to make sure this other thing is solved first. but…in order to resolve that, we’ve got to try this other business with flagging the models in such a way that…hang on, the tool will have to be updated to support…the…well, if we’re gonna go down *that* route, we may as well get it to do that other thing to, right? mmmmm that other thing will potentially unbalance all this other shit that has nothing to do with…wait, what was the middle thing? no…the *first* thing. what did that fella want me to do again?
and so it goes. fortunately, today was one of the good rabbit holes, where even though solving for Q is required in order to solve for A…we actually *did* solve for Q, then P, then O…and ultimately wound our way back to A. just in time for me to drag my ass home, where surely in the middle of the night i’ll sit bolt upright and realize, “oh hell. we forgot about R.”
turns out my skills as a pianist are the perfect metaphor for the fall of man.
in the beginning, they were robust, capable of (moderately) great things. but in the passage of time there emerged great technologies…and the concomitant dependency upon them. and in the end, when there was only The Tool, and it no longer needed it’s maker, Apollo shed a single tear that washed away the world.
i don’t know what the hell all that meant. all i know is – i used to be able to play the damn piano. now i just bumblefuck my way through stuff in C major or minor, then transpose it to whatever key it’s actually supposed to be in. i quantize all life away, then re-humanize (really? isn’t that tantamount to the toms on Eagles records being deadened by the engineer, only to have room verb applied to them in the final mix?). i normalize everything, then push a button to apply probabilistic approximations of the dynamics of an emotion-wracked performance. sigh. these days my interaction with the plastic ebony-and-ivories has all the spontaneity of nancarrow’s relationship to his piano rolls.
so yeah, i’m writing music today.
p.s. it’s good to see lum doing his thing. i have proof that i actually worked with and knew the guy once. said proof consists of a single photograph of him flipping me the bird. hm. on second thought i should probably refrain from this sort of name-dropping.
how liberating it must be to work on a quirky little game, for which you can write quirky little music. i found this stuff by way of gamasutra the other day, promptly made myself a copy via the analog hole, and have been enjoying it ever since. hang on sec…let me get through a whole sentence without hyperlinking something. shit.
this music serves as an enjoyable reminder that there can be much more to game music than your standard MMO Orchestral, FPS Jock Rock, licensed hip-hop, and *Hero & *Band karaoke. freed from genre-/marketing-/player-imposed expectations, this bloke was able to conjure up a series marvelously engaging and suggestive soundworlds that work wonders as standalone music. i bet they’re even more bitchin’ in the game (i haven’t played it yet…gimme a minute).
this music also serves as an enjoyable reminder of something i’ve been wrestling with a lot lately – how to make the music for our upcoming game not so…Exactly What You Expected (But Not So Out-There That You’re Left Scratching Your Head). i think the kids refer to this as “pushing the envelope”, or perhaps “thinking outside the box”. or maybe even “leveraging existing synergies to pollinate a strategic paradigm shift”. which means it’s time for me to quit typing and get back to trying to make this oboe, synth pad, and dub beat work together in a convincing manner before the producer hears the half-baked version and starts to question the wisdom of hiring me.
temp VO is the best.
in the early stages of a game’s development, in that period from just after “hey, we’ve got a game inhabited by characters who speak” to just before “hey, we’re off to hollywood to record a bunch of just-slightly-famous voice actors” is the period defined by “hey, let’s have our co-workers do temp versions of these for us…it’ll be hilarious! and, you know, productive.”
in addition to being pee-your-pants-funny, those sessions *are* productive, allowing us to test out all kinds of things – dialog, emotes, UI stuff, all the assorted grunts ‘n’ groans – before ponying up a chunk of company money to do ‘em for real. also it’s a great way to really get to know co-workers you might not normally cavort with, to get other devs invested in the audio in their game, and once in a while to actually find a real talent that gets called upon again and again…perhaps even ultimately being promoted from “temp” to “keeper” voice actor.
but all that is secondary to the giggling. like the time a female programmer provided us with a number of memorable “moans of agony” which were then applied to a region of the game that was supposed to be populated with dying NPCs. but through some miscommunication, said region ended up being populated *only* by the memorable “moans of agony”…which without visual reinforcement became dead ringers for “moans of ecstasy”. by the time i was made aware and hopped in for a look-see, there must’ve been 50 dev avatars bouncing around that spot, with virtual ears cocked. sounded like something caligula-esque was happening just out-of-sight. laughter filled the offices, including (thankfully) the office of the gal responsible for those moans.
temp VO is the best.
last night i shed a little more upper range hearing bouncing around the pit at the converge / high on fire show. the ringing in my ears tells me i shouldn’t be doing any critical listening on the job just yet. guess it’s documents & tools day today!
