Game Audio Relevance 005

You wake up late for school man you don't wanna go!

New Audio Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath Dev Diary
Registration is now open for the AESorg 41st Conference on Audio for Games!
Machinima.com personal picks - Inside Gaming Awards 2010 Best Sound Design
Wwise 2010.3 Now Available

Designing Sound - Jamey Scott Special: Reader Questions
Designing Sound - Jamey Scott Special: Unreal Tournament [Exclusive Interview]
Designing Sound - Jamey Scott Special: Gears of War [Exclusive Interview]
Designing Sound - Audio Director Mike Keogh on the sound of "The UnderGarden"
Designing Sound -  “Fable III” – Exclusive Interview with Kristen Quebe, Kristofor Mellroth and Shannon Potter

TinySubversions: GDC networking stories from Jeff Edward Ball
First videogame console was mute! Magnavox Odyssey: Music To Play Games By via SounDesignBlog
SALMAN RUSHDIE raps on RED DEAD REDEMPTION & THE VIDEOGAMES
We Love Indie GameMusic
Game Audio Forum München
Zach Quarles New blog post: 10 Years Strong
Terraformers post mortem - a 3D game for both blind and sighted
“How Video Games are Different from Anything You’ve Worked on Before!"
Time Machine - part IV: Sound Tricks of Mickey Mouse
The Polynomial: Space of the music
Battlefield Vietnam Hardware #7: The Sounds of the 60's
Official photos from AESSF
Buy MP3s of sessions you missed at AESSF
In The Loop: Planning for Feedback in Game Audio Production
GraphicalScores.org Everythings related to graphic scores and Wiki
The Music of Majin and The Forsaken Kingdom
New "Field and Toys 2010" video here
Maya pyramids = acoustics riddle
FABLE III: A Fable in and of Itself
Making of Rabbit Ears Audio Hydrophonic Library

Using FMOD and simple music visualizer demo code and slides are up
Kawasaki ZX6R sound with fmod designer
Intro to Audio API's: FMOD, Wwise & Unreal

New MusicofSound blog post:: Creative Process
The Artistic Necessity Of Constraint
Robert Henke (Monolake) speaks of Making Decisions in Music Making

Dynamic Interference - New site post: Rollback...AES 2010 Day 3
Dynamic Interference - New site post: Rollback...AES 2010 Day 2

Interview with Composer Jared Emerson-Johnson on Tales of Monkey Island
Interview with Jared Emerson-Johnson Bay Area Sound's Composer Wunderkind

Trinigy/ Firelight Partner to Bundle FMODEX into Vision Engine 8 via EngineAudio.com
One of the best demonstrations of sound design in the FMOD Sandbox I have seen in a while via EngineAudio.com

UDK problem using Distance Crossfade for 1p/3p sounds, sound gets retriggered. Ideas on a fix? See Video Example via EngineAudio.com

via Lost Lab (that's me!)
Music Vault: The Pac-Man Album
Game Developer - Sound Design: The Forgotten Team
AES 2010 - Game Audio Track Wrap

Keep em' peeled,
-lcl

Music Vault: The Pac-Man Album

Today's foray into the Music Vault proffers an incredible artifact from the vinyl library that we've been recently reunited with. The Pac-Man Album picture disc hit's a sweet spot in my adolescent heart, as I'm fond of claiming Ms. Pac-Man as my first girlfriend.

I hope you find time to appreciate it in all it's glory!




-The Pac-Man Album: Side 1 (.mp3)

The Pac-Man Theme
Pac-Man's Magic Land
I'm Number 1
The Gang of Ghosts Quarter

Side One kicks off with some sampled audio (likely) from the game cabinet, and then musically unfolds into a synth-a-licios disco hoe-down of sing-song-y goodness.





-The Pac-Man Album: Side 2 (.mp3)

Turning Blue
He's Too Busy for Me
If it's a Game
The Pac-Man Finale

Side Two contains a brilliant solo performance by Ms. Pac-Man, and I suggest it be adopted by audio widows across the (magic) land.

This is the first of my Video Game Music collection, keep an eye peeled in the future for another nugget of yesteryear in the future.

For those of you adventurous enough to peel back the dermis on my video game addled upbringing, read on for a fascinating peek behind the curtain.

Relevant Story #1

Towards the end of High School there emerged a scene of sorts centered around an all night establishment called "The World Zoo" and located "Midway" between the Twin Cities of Minnesota. This became a lightning rod for all sorts of outcasts and all-aged shenanigans, and could often be found populated by a beautiful mess of characters from disparate locations in the area. The drama ran deep most nights, as cliques formed in an instant and were dissolved just as fast. My only escape from the swarming teenage emotions was the upright Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. I took to carrying a roll of quarters around with me, and in that way I was always guaranteed time to myself when things got too hairy. I chalk it up as one of the only ways I was able to survive that time of my life, the other relevant ingredient to that was the camaraderie of good friends.

I'll close by saying that: it's the people (real or pixelated) who help you through this life.

Relevant Story #2

Once upon a time I worked in a Call Center at a local University. During one of the many "reorganizations" that have become popular in todays fast-changing administrative sector found a group of us dropped down in the middle of a grey-walled cubicle jungle. Imagine if you will 5 or 6 phones in a constant ebb and flow of ringing and answering, ensconced in a dressed down "silence is golden" work environment. But that's not all. With us we brought a record player, with enough vinyl to exist for days on end without repeat. We routed the output into this crazy Telex Brain that we than distributed cabling out to each individual workstation. Each us us then became quipped with a set of local powered speakers in order to control our own volumes independently. All day long depending on arrival times, each of us would take turns picking out music and flipping our own records. I won't go too deep into the psychology of 'picks' except to say that there's more to it than meets the eye. Needless to say, someone (and it wasn't me!) was slightly infatuated with this record and it found it's way into constant rotation so much so that my posting it here is a slight tribute to her.We also had to hide it on occasion, but all in good fun!

I'll close by saying that: it's the people you work with who sometimes make working worthwhile.

Thanks to everyone I've had the pleasure to meet, get to know, and work with!

Gobble Gobble,
-lcl

Game Developer - Sound Design: The Forgotten Team

This bit hit too close to home when I read it the first time. I though "In a few short paragraphs someone at a production level has boiled down the plight of game audio across the industry." I say that because it has been my experience that most of the time what he describes is not the exception but the rule in today's development cycle. I can say no more, but feel inclined to excerpt "What Went Wrong #5" from the recent Game Developer postmortem for Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions.

"Along the chain of production, many design choices occur, and just as many changes are made, if not more. When delays happen at any stage in the process, the last team in the line of production is the one trapped against the deadline wall. This was the audio team on Shattered Dimensions.


As the entire development team iterated on every aspect of the game simultaneously throughout development, nothing was ever really final until the very end. Hence it was impossible for the audio team to start working on anything with final quality in mind, and it was very hard to determine what portions of the game could be worked on at what time, with minimum risk. Eventually, when everything in the game reached final quality simultaneously, the amount of accumulated audio work was just too much for the team to handle."

You can read a preview of the article page which includes the full exceprt here:

Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions Postmortem: Sound Design - The Forgotten Team

It's great to see honest and clear insight into the production process as it relates to the sound team.As someone who has personally seen the ripple effect of other disciplines missed deadlines with little understanding of how that effects other stakeholders standing down stream, it's refreshing (if not a little disheartening) to see it in black and white. It's clear that there are many ways to approach a solution to this problem, not all involve jockeying the schedule, but many involve increasing the the awareness of where audio falls in the pipeline and how each discipline affects the eventual workflow.

I'll be looking forward to seeing some of these practices pave the way for a tighter integration of game audio scheduling in the future!

Until next time true believers!

Game Audio Relevance 004

Hot on the heels of my AES 2010 Wrap Up I'm corraling the last months Game Audio related news into a impossibly verbose and undigestible chunk of internet link goodness.

SONORY is a company that specializes in synthesizing the sound of vehicles
Goldeneye DS Dynamic Music
Now Hear This - "Sound Rendering" and Harmonic Fluids
RjDj-style augmented/interactive sound-project based on the Inception-soundtrack?
Andy Serkis on Enslaved and acting in video games
Framework for making 2D games with Lua using a basic OpenAL interface.
A 'batteries included' awesome sauce solution to getting Lua up and running.
Presentation .PDF of San Fran GameSoundCon 2010 talk on procedural audio for games
N64 -Wii, Re-imagining “GoldenEye 007? Exclusive Interview w/ Graeme Norgate and Steve Duckworth
Notation vs BINKY vs visualisation
Microsoft DirectMusic Producer - No I haven't missed you, but here we are again.
Whats So Special About Interactive Audio?
Call for Papers: The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio
Making Interactive Music
Dynamic Music in Wwise
Shmusicup: Dodge Bullet Patterns Created By Your Own Music
Behind the Sounds of Fable III: From Chicken Singalongs to Very Angry Dogs
Epic Mickey Music and Sound
Good piece on Rock Band 3, Power Gig, and the decline of music games.
Rock Band 3, Behind the Scenes: When A Music Game Gets More Real
An Interview with Zachary Quarles, ID Software’s Audio Lead
The Game Audio Tutorial's take on Portal's GlaDos
Stephan Schütze: FMOD 101
Stephan Schütze: Using XACT for Sound Design
Stephan Schütze: Boingy Boingy Boingy - Why I hate repetition and what can be done about it.
Interview with New Vegas composter Inon Zur
Part 2 of a behind the scenes look at Back to the Future: The Game, 'Hey McFly!' now!
Ben Long talks with Jeff Essex, a veteran of Interactive Audio
Stadium Crowd Recording Session - NCAA Football UF Gators vs. LSU Tigers
Sound in Canabalt
Information about Attenuation and the Distance Model in the Unreal audio system.
'From the Shadows of Film Sound', is available now!
Interview: Super Meat Boy 's Silly Take On Classic Platformers
BeatPortal - How to get music in video games
"How to get into the Video Game Industry" (Sound Designer Edition)!
[GCAP 2010] Interview: Emily Ridgway - Emily Industries
Brutal Legend: More Than Just Noise: It's Called...Heavy Metal!
Aaron Marks Special: Function of Game Sound Effects
Podcast with Bernie Krause, who collected an impressive library of soundscapes: listen to ants singing!
Soundtracking Mario - Koji Kondo. Edge Mag article
The tech behind the music of Fallout: New Vegas' Mojave Wasteland
Sound of the Dead: audio design in Dead Nation
Official PS3 sound bar designed to enhance game dialog
Mick Gordon interview with the awesome Stylus Monkey
Splash Damage Talks Audio for "Brink"
Subversion: Dev Blog 20 - Multi-track Music w/ tool pics and video examples

A ton about BioShock Infinite's tech? Check out this reply from TD Chris Kline

"BioShock 1's audio system was... umm... "sub-optimal". This time around our sound team demanded a new audio pipeline based on AudioKinetic's WWise technology that supported 5.1 with adjustable dynamic range and a fully dynamic mixing system. Not only did our engineers rise to that task, but they subsequently took it up a notch and implemented both a custom sound propagation system (so voices properly echo down corridors and around buildings) and a dynamic wind audio system that reinforces the dynamic weather in the world."

Audio Implementation Greats #9: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Multiplayer: Dynamic Wind System 

Now that I've got all of that off my chest, it's time to get back to work!
-lcl