365 days in the life
one year ago today was my first day at Zenimax. one year ago today i was trying to put eight great years of Mythic behind me, and come to terms with how complete a fresh start this was, and the magnitude of the opportunity that lay before me.
i was reconnecting with peers i’d worked with off and on for more than a decade. i was sitting in a bare office, looking at a fresh windows install with no audio software or hardware whatsoever. i was trying to remember where the bathroom was.
twelve short months from then ’til now. and here i am, sitting in front of a game-in-progress that has interactive music, voiceover, and combat & ambient sound effects integrated to a suprisingly complete degree. and we’re just getting started, folks.
one year later, and my initial optimism and enthusiasm has not been abated by months of actual work. quite the opposite – the past year of rubber-hitting-the-road has *raised* my expectations, not lowered them. that’s a nice change from the kind of situation where the reality on the ground forces you to make compromises, sacrifices, and deals with the devil until that high bar you had once set for yourself is nothing more than a wistful recollection.
a long time ago, the Professional Objective on my resume arrogantly proclaimed i was out to “realize the unrealized potential of game audio”. after a few years and a few games that fell short of that lofty boast, i struck that from my resume and replaced it with something more sensible. but the past year has got me thinking about that turn of phrase again…and that this is the best chance i’ve had yet to actually back up the bluster with substance.
so i blow out the single imaginary candle on my imaginary cupcake (chocolate), and make a wish to finally fulfill that original Professional Objective. :)
casting call
can you make ridiculously inhuman noises with your mouth? are you less inhibited than your average nudist? do you work just down the hall? then you too could voice one of the critters in our game!
come on in, don’t be afraid. stand over here next to this microphone. scoot up now, it won’t bite…whoa there, not *too* close. now let’s hear what ya got. just have a look at this concept art and watch the animations on that screen over there, and do whatever comes to mind. let ‘er rip! and don’t mind us…try and ignore us focusing on you, making mental notes and occasionally muttering some techno-speak or another that you won’t quite understand.
that’s good! really, great job. now here’s what we want you to do. try it again, but don’t do it anything at all like you just did. do it like this – imagine you’re a 300 pound duck, but with murder in your heart…but don’t lose the fundamental levity of the character. yes, i know that looks nothing like a duck. just trust us on this. jeez, who’s the audio professional here? hahaha, just kidding. really, you’re doing great. now let’s take another crack at it.
you don’t need a break, do you? were you working on something important before we nabbed you on your way out to lunch? never you mind, this is for The Greater Good…i’m sure your Team Lead will understand. say…you’re not feeling self-conscious are you, knowing half the office can hear you floundering about…i mean voice acting? oh, you didn’t realize? ha, well, the walls aren’t *that* thick, you know? don’t worry…just keep reminding yourself as you head back down the corridor that they’re not laughing *at* you, they’re laughing at the noises you just spent the last 45 minutes making. but i’m sure they realize those long sustained groans were groans of “agony”, not…of… something else.
whelp, i guess we’re just about done here. as it turns out, this is really good stuff! we’re totally going to use this – though when we’re done with it you’ll never recognize it, thereby ruining any chance you might have down the road of bragging, “that’s me, that’s me!” and by the way, what are you doing tomorrow, say…during your lunch break?
i sense a theme here
from the same audio department that brought you the sound at the end of this post, comes the following. a recent audio dept. status report from my wingman included the following line item listed among the day’s accomplishments:
“#7) i farted a couple of times throughout the day.”
i’m sorry, but every time i read that it brings tears of laughter. there, it just set me off again. really, i’m sorry. hey i’m just using the power of the press to peel back the glamorous facade of game development and expose its clandestine and tawdry nature. i’m a muckraker, i am.
crisis of incessant white noise averted
i was greeted this morning with a rather disturbing development regarding the plans for the future audio facility here: somebody had decided that putting a machine room up against our outer wall was a good idea. a machine room. the kind of thing that goes “GHGHGHGH” at about 60 dB, 24 hours a day. the kind of thing that probably has to be cooled by HVAC, which also goes “GHGHGHGH” as it vibrates the floor / walls / ceiling. the kind of thing we spent a month of floorplan back-and-forth making sure we avoided (can’t be near the bathroom! can’t be near the elevators! can’t be near the central HVAC! gotta be on seperate electrical!). what the deuce.
then just as i’m trying to figure out how to deal with this – hey, let’s float the machine room! – word comes back that no, the machine room is not up against the studio after all, but *across* from it. whew. for a minute there i was afraid i was going to earn the eternal disgust of my pro audio smooth buddy who’s been giving me advice on this project. don’t worry greg, i’ll still manage to screw it all up somehow. stand by.
the cart before the chicken & the horse and the egg
i seem to have a lot of posts that follow the format “ah, i remember when… / so, nowadays…” or sometimes the other way ’round. so in that fine tradition…
ah, i remember when. working at Kesmai with a relatively small team of a few dozen folks, there were two ways of getting your pet feature (or desperately needed functionality) into the game. The Right Way – having an approved design, getting your tech docs in order, getting implementation on the schedule, and let engineering take its course. and The Ninja Way – ascertaining the programmer’s favorite scotch, procuring a bottle, and presenting said bottle in exchange for getting the work done after hours (and not while consuming the scotch…that part is key).
so, nowadays. we’ve got a pet feature that we want to get in, and we’re really psyched on it. thing is, Zenimax is a much bigger studio, working on much bigger projects, with much bigger development processes. almost everything has to be done The Right Way. it’s much harder (and more frowned upon) to do stuff The Ninja Way. loose cannons are bad for well-oiled machines, to mix my metaphors. but our pet feature is of such a nature that one almost has to see the finished version in the game to be convinced it even belongs on the feature list. that is, we have to get it done before we can get it started – the best way to build momentum for design approval is to actually show the damn thing to people. holy catch-22, batman.
hm. what’s even more stealthy than a Ninja?
night of the living baseheads
once upon a time, perusing my sound effects libraries went something like this: search for the sound i needed via some crude FileMaker Pro thing, pull the physical audio CD off a shelf, stick it in my CD-ROM drive, spin it up and RECORD IT INTO MY AUDIO EDITOR. record. the audio. in realtime. granted, this was 1995 and it was also the first year of my doing things like “perusing sound effects libraries”, but still. kee-ripes.
eventually i wisened up and ripped all the SFX CDs to my hard drive (boy did i ever think i was clever) and suddenly had all those sound effects right there at my finger tips. needless to say, that sped things up a bit. that also afforded me the option of doing clever things with file renaming, so i could use Windows search capabilities to find files my own way.
also i found myself doing a lot of database prep work, using Audition batch processes to strip out the silences between cues, hi-pass stuff @ 15 Hz, even do a little compression & limiting across the board. so while i was using a combination of FileMaker Pro & Windows to navigate the sound libraries, i was simply using the Audition “file open” dialog to, yes, audition them. with auto-play enabled in the dialog, i’d click around all the files until i heard what i wanted. i got to know the first few seconds of every file very, very well. :) and thanks to the prep work, a file that originally might’ve been 20 seconds long with five explosions at different volumes all seperated by a few seconds of silence became a 10 second file with all the explosions kinda sorta “mastered”. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM went the auto-play. that was me perusing my libraries in the early 2000′s.
now of course software like Soundminer and (my fave) Basehead combine uber-thooper-dooper database search & retrieval and keyword management (buh-bye FileMaker Pro) with on-the-spot auditioning (buh-bye “file open” dialog) in one sexy package. type in “horse fart” and get hundreds of…hm? what? oh, just the one? okay, “horse fart” gives us just one hit – a real gem, mind you. but type in “metal rattle” and get hundreds or even thousands of hits, depending on how many libraries you’ve got lying about. you can listen through them all as fast as you can arrow up & down, or jump into each file a bit, and even pitch it up & down to see what the effects of transposition would be. then you just drag whatever selections tickle your fancy right into your waiting audio software. lovely.
every time i do this it puts a smile on my face. because i’m old enough to remember how much time and effort used to be involved every time you thought to yourself, “you know what this SFX session needs? a little bit of metal rattle, about two seconds worth, right here on track 2…” i bet that used to take me about 15 minutes. now i can do it in about 15 seconds. freeing up lots of time to pen this dreck and refresh facebook.
and thar she blows…our favorite SFX DB search return: “horse fart.wav”
like pulling the fire alarm in school, but better
the plan for today was: map out the forthcoming milestone, do a little postmortem assessment of how the last one turned out, shoot a lot of shit about the state of audio tech in the game, get through a meeting or two, then work through the night on music or something fun while the rest of the world sleeps.
the reality of today was: the power went out in the building early in the afternoon. we stepped outside to play some ball in the gorgeous, humidity-free, summer-in-april weather. we got word that the power wasn’t coming back on anytime soon and the buliding would be locked until the next morning. with heads hung low (ha), we reluctantly (ha!) convened at a favorite watering hole well *before* happy hour. the next six hours were spent in an adirondack chair at “the beach” – the secluded, sand-covered, outdoor section of said watering hole – with the sun pressing me further and further into that chair until nightfall, at which point i had to be forcibly peeled from it.
adopt, adapt, improve…right?
