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Written by John Rozewicki
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Friday, 15 February 2008 |
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Here's a very quick list I came up with to make sure I'm grabbing the most difficult, and most essential, foley effects first. My first acquisition date will probably be next Monday. I have a pretty good idea where I'm going to get most of these effects. Some of them will require layering. Others will require experimentation. I don't think any of the sounds are particularly hard to get, but I might need to redo them to make sure they fit.
This list is just the ones I could think of off the top of my head, and I'll surely add more and keep track of them as I go along. I have to start somewhere. May as well start with the obvious ones. As well, I think getting the ambient sounds first will go a long way in selling my mix.
Must-haves - Point
- Wood pestle scraping against wooden bowl with paste, close.
- Tent flap rustling.
- Scratch pad rustling.
- Sharpie writing on scratch pad.
- Water being poured on fire, steam, slight sizzle.
- Escalator from elder beirman, in mall.
- PA airport sounds.
- keyboard typing sounds.
- sign flipping sound.
Must-haves - Ambient
- Waterside.
- Bonfire crackling
- Small musty tent, little echo.
- Breathing, very close.
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Written by John Rozewicki
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
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This is the inaugural post in the newly-created TCOM433 category which was created to handle my journaling duties.
TCOM433 is the Advanced Audio class at Ball State University. It's the final class in the set of audio classes, and so the idea is that we get to pitch and do our dream audio project.
The project I chose to do was audio recreation on a five minute segment of my favorite television show - L O S T. While watching the show over the past few years I've noticed that the audio in the show is lacking quite a bit. Though I realize that this is because they are on a severe time crunch for each episode, I'll be interested to see what I can do with it.
My segment: Locke's dream quest in Season 3's 4th episode, Further Instructions.
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Written by John Rozewicki
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Thursday, 24 January 2008 |
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There is an interesting situation having to do with personal websites. The busier you are, the less time you have available to spend updating the world on how busy you are. The most productive I've ever been on this website was at times when I didn't really have a job. I was on breaks. Unfortunately, breaks and vacations don't really make for very interesting sorts of updates. I'm not sure anyone cares that I go 120 stars in Super Mario Galaxy.
I've obviously been busy. Mario doesn't collect those stars by himself.
Aside from video game pursuits, I've been sick. As well, I've begun new classes and have been preparing to make a trip to study abroad in Japan this May. There will be more on this in the coming weeks. I am planning an interesting media-type project concerning my trip to Japan.
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Written by John Rozewicki
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
Here is a scenario, for you, the reader. Imagine loading up your favorite video game and finding that something was somehow…off. You wouldn’t, at first, notice that the game has become significantly more boring. That the game has become harder. But after a while you would notice that it has become slightly more difficult to know whether or not you have gotten a critical hit or just whiffed past your enemy on that last sword swing. The game world feels sterile, vacant, or empty. Your emotions don’t stir in quite the same way as your on-screen puppet grabs that all-important item. You don’t really know whether or not there are enemies lurking ‘round the corner. Now imagine that this is all happening because you have decided to put in earplugs.
That’s right, sound. All of the detriments to the gaming experience that were described above were things that happen when you remove sound. Despite sometimes being treated as such, it is not just a way to spice the experience up. Sound has a legitimate purpose in games. It is a very efficient method of user feedback, and surprisingly, for all the things it does for us while we game, you could call it a recent addition.
Without sound Mario may have found himself seriously ill
A History Lesson
Gaming history can be retraced reasonably back to about 1962 when Spacewar was first developed for the PDP-1. At that time, games were a lark to demonstrate the power of computer systems. They were little more than demos running on hardware that wasn’t really designed to handle things like games. So, for the first half of gaming history games didn’t have sound in any significant fashion.
The intense action of... SPACE WAR!!!
In fact, games made before about 1984 had little more than simple tone generators hidden inside of them for providing audio. This gives us the pronounced bleeps and bloops that we so lovingly associate with our early gaming experiences. Hardware was limited to one sound at a time, and music was possible as long as it came from an accompanying record or was extremely slow, short, and appearing only on the title screen. Needless to say, game developers of the time did not employ many musicians.
Unemployed thanks to the gaming industries ZERO demand!
Thankfully, sound of the time I am talking about probably was an icing on the cake feature. There was really no question as to whether or not an event had happened in a game. It was plain as day right there on the screen. But even so, music and sound added unquestionable depth to the experience. The games felt more alive to the people playing them.
A Significant Progression
And so, things progressed, and they progressed fast. It took 15-20 years to go from no sound at all in Spacewar to the simplistic tone-generated bloops of something like Pac-Man. However, in a similar span of time we’ve gone from NES-style chip music to sound indistinguishable from that of movies.
Ah HELL NAH, I heard you coming
Interestingly, this is why they still sometimes use the old bleep and bloop sounds of old when you see a character playing a videogame in a movie. Games today do not sound like games. They sound like movies, and so it wouldn’t be readily apparent to an older generation of viewers that there was a video game being played. Of course, another reason for this might be that production companies do not want to pay to license to the sound of any particular game. Thankfully for all the gamers in the audience, this has been done away with. Video games are now seen as another instance of product placement.
Games and Movies
Back to the topic at hand, I feel that this comparison to movies is an apt one. This is especially the case as graphics get better and better. Gamers will not be content with there being a disparity between the visuals they’re seeing and the sound they are hearing. One of today’s games with tone-generated sound wouldn’t be well-received. High quality visuals need to be accompanied by sound of a similar caliber. Because of all this, sound really is half of the experience and depending on who you ask it could be more.
Hollywood - take notes mm'kay?
Unfortunately, as it sometimes does in film, sound still goes underappreciated in games. Very few gamers are probably aware who created the catchy tunes that bring their beloved game world to life. Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, and Kazumi Totaka are just not household names even though nearly everybody who would describe themselves as a gamer has probably played a game containing their music. Kondo wrote the Mario theme, Nobuo Uematsu has done music for most installments of the Final Fantasy franchise, and Kazumi Totaka’s music is in almost every first-party Nintendo game since 1996 as well as being the voice of Yoshi.
An Appreciation
That is really what this is all about, appreciation and understanding. If gaming is to transcend from timewaster to something lofty such as art then we, as gamers, have to really know how far we’ve come. We have to know why this is important. We have to know what we like, and why. Hopefully this article has shed some light on the importance of sound in video games. The background music gets us in the proper mood. The effects give us information that hasn’t been made explicit by the visuals. Sounds give the world personality and ambiance so that we feel like we are there.
Sound is at least half of the modern gaming experience. With surround systems especially, audio technology has surpassed graphics. Modern graphics only allow you to kind of see what’s happening, but sound allows you to be there in a way that won’t be possible with graphics for at least another decade. Let’s all appreciate this.
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Written by John Rozewicki
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Friday, 27 July 2007 |
I am a long-time video gamer. I remember fondly the dusty horrible smell of the second-hand crate of Atari 2600(with games) my father pulled from an antique store while we were on vacation. A week or so later we were home and I was introduced to my first, very own, console video game experience – Atari Pac-Man. It was crap. In fact, most of the 30 or so games that came along with that console were crap. Today, you wouldn’t play them more than 3 minutes before tossing them away. They were so simplistic that it’s hard to think back to that time and remember how many hours I spent playing Megamania, Ms. Pac-man, or Centipede…I feel so ashamed.
Arcade Phenomenom: Centipede
But, I digress. Today, conversely, you can pick up most video games and play them for hours and hours upon end without finishing. Dragon Quest 8 is nearly 60 hours at a minimum, and that’s understandable because it’s an RPG. However, even games that are looked at as kind of short are surprisingly long. The recently released Tomb Raider: Anniversary is about 20 hours for most players. I’m shocked that a game of that length is seen as a kind of short little ditty barely worth the price of admission. Even handheld games suffer this same problem. That’s crazy.
I’m not sure you realize just how long 20 hours is. To be more exacting, that’s 1200 minutes. You could watch about 10 full-length movies in that time. Not 78 minute old Disney classics, by the way, but full 2 hour movies. You could also listen to the audio version of a nearly 600 page book, and if you chose to read those pages as opposed to listening to them then that page count would approach 900. That’s more than 1/3rd of the way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or through any other single volume that might be published. And so, 20 hours is a fucking long ass time to put it very concisely.
That's time spent not being here.
It’s ridiculous for gamers, as a community, to look down on games that aren’t longer than 15-20 hours. We want to argue about replay value and bang-for-buck when I haven’t finished a game in nearly 3 months. I don’t want longer games, and I don’t think you should either. A game’s story is no good to anyone if players can’t finish the game, or even finish it in enough time to keep the story straight.
Interestingly, shorter games have some inherent significant benefits. Having less overall game content to produce allows developers to spend more time tightening and prettying the experience in the remaining game content. Because of this, shorter games have less bugs, have more detail in their game worlds, and are a tighter more well-packaged experience. On top of all this players, will be more likely to finish. Finishing the game gives players both a sense of accomplishment and leaves them wanting more.
This last part is very important, and I think it’s something that current game developers do not understand. Apart from Ico, Anachronox, Beyond Good & Evil, and Psychonauts there are few games that have ever left me wanting more. This is so strange because in nearly every other media the whole idea is to leave people wanting more. I’m never satiated by an episode of Lost or by the end of one Stephen King's Dark Tower novels. I’ve enjoyed the experience and so I want more.
I think it’s a problem that I’ve played quite a number of hours of Final Fantasy XII, haven’t finished, and yet don’t necessarily want more. I should probably finish it, but I know that there’s just so much there. It’s such a sheer unsalable wall that I know I’ll probably never be able to reach the summit. I don’t have the time or the attention span, but I would really like to.
For these reasons, I cry out to developers, “Stop! Halt! Do not pass go! Give me quality over quantity.” I don’t want to shell out $50 dollars for 90 hour epics I’ll never finish. I want to be able to finish my games. I want to know the rest of the story. I have no need for filler. Does one of the volumes of Lord of the Rings need filler? That’s essentially what we’re talking about here. The obvious answer is, no we don’t need it. The crazy part is that it costs more to do that. It costs more to water down the experience.
Size only matters in some gaming...
In short, give me something streamlined. Don’t dilly-dally. I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to pay for it. Give me a bigger, better, faster, stronger experience. I swear that I, and many other gamers who don’t know it, will be happier if you do that. In the meantime, I’m going to reward developers who have gotten things right by playing Telltale Games’ excellent Sam & Max – Abe Lincoln Must Die!
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Written by John Rozewicki
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Wednesday, 25 July 2007 |
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On
July 19th, Silicon Knights, developers of the upcoming Xbox360 title
Too Human, filed a lawsuit in North Carolina court suing Epic Games,
developers of the Unreal Engine, for breach of contract. Since that
time, the internet has exploded with a whole bunch of ridiculous fanboy
grandstanding and arguments over the suit’s legitimacy. Well, I’m here
to tell you that Epic is clearly in the wrong if even some of the
accusations made in the suit are correct.
Let me preface
by saying, I’m not a fanboy. The last Unreal game I played was Unreal
Tournament nearly 8 years ago. I don’t own an Xbox360, and have had
minimal time playing Gears of War or anything else by Epic since.
However, I’m not a Silicon Knights fanboy either. While I have played
more of their games than of Epic’s, I still had to look up who they
were on Wikipedia to know why this lawsuit was important enough to
warrant bitching and moaning about on the internet. So, I believe
myself to be in a position of neutrality on this issue.
Epic
fanboys might not like it, but it appears as though they have treated
the licensees of the Unreal Engine differently than they have treated
fans and purchasers of their video games. Epic does have a long track
record of keeping up with substantial patches, updates, and new
content for their games years after their release, but this doesn’t
make up for any wrongdoing they may have done to their business
partners. It just makes it really sad to see a company with a good
reputation take a well-deserved hit.
And, this hit is well-deserved. If you pare the suit down to its
essentials (minus the lawyering bullshit) Epic has breached their
contract with Silicon Knights. Epic promised, by contract, that they
would give Silicon Knights finalized release-worthy engines in specific
timeframes: March ‘06 for Xbox360 and February ‘07 for Playstation 3.
Both of these deadlines, the Xbox360 most egregiously, failed to be met
by Epic. This is a clear breach of the contract Epic had with Silicon
Knights. There isn’t any way around that because there doesn’t exist
any method for releasing a game sans engine. I think that people have
missed these important facts amongst the rest of normal slippery lawyer
case-building. The rest of the suit alleges that Epic signed Silicon
Knights on as a licensee to raise money to build their games, and
because Silicon Knights’ own game development suffered, for this reason
they should be granted a piece of the profits from Epic’s Gears of War.
While this does seem to go a little far, it is hard to blame them. A
person or company would be foolish to not go as far as possible in
court to get what they want. Otherwise, they might get nothing. At
least in this case with Silicon Knights there is a leg to stand on with
the contract breaches outlined above. Any other judgments awarded in
their favor will be considered a bonus. This is, unfortunately, how
suing works in the United States. This is why it’s hard to fault
Silicon Knights. They’re just playing the game.
At
this point, it is unclear whether or not other companies also had a
situation like this with Epic, but I would like to venture a
hypothesis. Too Human has been in development for longer than a lot of
other games. This means that they may have licensed Unreal Engine 3 at
a time when other companies were still signing on to Unreal Engine 2
for their shorter-term projects. This means that Silicon Knights might
be in a semi-unique position as an early adopter of the engine. Other
companies might have signed on to the engine later and with different,
more realistic, timeframes written into their contracts. I can see how
Epic might have a tough time gauging how long developing the engine
might take if they had started taking on licensees earlier than they
should have. It could well be that we don’t see other companies jumping
on this bandwagon. This might be an isolated incident between Silicon
Knights and Epic.
In closing, it’s incredibly easy in cases like this to get wrapped up
in how we might feel about a particular side. And who knows, maybe
Silicon Knights are incredible assholes for suing, but we can’t toss
out the truth just because it comes from a source we might not like. We
just have to wait and see how this pans out before we start attributing
feelings and emotions to the game companies we’re whining about on the
internet.
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