Set your content creators free with scripting
The roles of technical artist, technical designer, and technical sound designer capture the rare breed of individuals who have a combination of artistic and technical talents. With a bit of structure...
View ArticleWhat can story-driven games learn from sports games?
Sports games take a lot of flack for not being inventive, and year-on-year iterations may not be as glamorous as the latest AAA-blockbuster, but Sports games are amongst the largest franchises in...
View ArticleInteractive Audio Fundamentals – Part 1
Audio for games has come a long way from the iconic single sample sound effects of the 8-bit era. Modern AAA games have audio that rivals the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, and in many ways exceeds...
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Your engine is deaf and your tool is dumb. What can you do about it? (Part 1)
Paradoxically, most audio engines are deaf. They take decisions that will impact the audio output of a game without listening to what they are playing. The same can be said of sound tools: they will...
View ArticleInteractive Audio Fundamentals – Part 2
Last time we looked at layers and how we can massively increase the variation in our sounds and give ourselves more control and more dynamic options by breaking our sound into layers. We saw that...
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Real Unusual I/O Slowdowns (Part 3)
I’m continuing my series of actual problem I/O patterns that I’ve seen, heard about, or debugged in games or game-related situations. These are all real-world situations, they often cause unusual or...
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Theme and Variations: Letting Your Music Give Birth to More Music
If you dabble in music and composition you know well that writing music and coming up with new material can be a challenging task. You have moments of inspiration where a great tune or chord...
View ArticleInteractive Audio Fundamentals – Part 3
Well, it’s been awhile since our previous installment, but we’re back with the third and final part in our Interactive Audio Fundamentals series. In Part 1, we took a look at the power of layers to...
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Performance Anxiety 2: You’re doing it wrong
I don't know what you're trying to do, but I'm pretty sure you're doing it wrong Well, it turns out I was right to be afraid. Despite erring on the side of caution, dumbing down models and textures,...
View ArticleDynamic Looping with the BASS Audio API
I find it easiest to write about something I’ve done recently, so I’m going to share about the dynamic music system I made for Chickens 4 Cash on Monday. I’ll first explain how it came about, then...
View ArticleWhy Audio Matters
There are two kinds of people who are reading this article. First are the people who saw the word “audio” in a game industry blog and got excited because that doesn’t happen very often. And then...
View ArticleTeam Audio vs. The Milestone
Time again for the epic battle of the ages: Team Audio vs. The Milestone! It sounds much more glamorous than it is, but it is yet an epic battle, and it is probably safe to say “of the ages,” because...
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The Making of a Trailer
Today I released a trailer for my iPhone app Alcohology. This is the first trailer I’ve ever worked on1 and I documented the process. This post is a behind the scenes / making of / evolution /...
View ArticleTeam Audio Relies On You To Let Us Know
I bet you don’t realize how much audio relies on you to inform us of stuff. Well, maybe you do, in your endless brilliance, but it seems like most people don’t, in their endless ignorance. I don’t mean...
View ArticleI am a slave to the groove
I’m surprised by how quickly music can change my mood. I was walking in town today, anxious. The photography class I was headed to had started almost a half hour ago; I’d just had a slightly surreal,...
View ArticleDo Reviews Matter To Me?
Saints Row: The Third is coming out soon. I’ve spent the last few years of my life on it. Just living and breathing Saints Row, day in, day out. Now it’s done. It hits the street on 11/15, which is...
View ArticleI Want It To Sound Chocolatey
Sometimes people seem afraid to talk to audio designers. And not because we’re emotional, or eccentric, or because our offices smell weird, like a gym sock with a turd in it, even though all of those...
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Plagiarism is just what we do!
Subscribers to this blog may know that while I teach Computer Game Programming, I’ve had a long involvement in plagiarism in Academia, mostly through sitting on various national committees as well as...
View ArticleWhat Isn’t Sound Design?
What isn’t sound design? That’s a weird question. Well, not that weird. It’s not like asking why I frequently wear briefs made from bologna. The answer to that, by the way, is because most people would...
View ArticleTeam Audio: Emotion Designers
I think our current titles might be throwing people off. Sound designer, audio designer, audio artist… they just don’t convey the underlying purpose of what we do, which is make people feel something....
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