#gamasutra

[l-1-z-a]

🌎🎵 Planet of Sound: Talking Art, Noise, and Games with EA's Robi Kauker (2009)

An interview with Robi Kauker from EA reveals the role of avant-garde music and experimental sound in games (The Sims, Spore). He discusses generative audio, the importance of gender balance in the industry, and the use of Max/MSP for efficiently creating soundtracks and audio content.

Robi Kauker is the audio director for the EA Play Label at Electronic Arts and for almost ten years he's been helping create the multilayere

Facts about The Sims 2 from interview:

Technological continuity: The development of The Sims 2 did not involve “reinventing the wheel” from scratch; the project borrowed from and expanded upon technologies used in SimCity 4. This was part of an ongoing cycle of sharing ideas and tools between different Electronic Arts teams.

Creating the robot voice: Robi Kauker, the series’ audio director, personally wrote a custom Max/MSP plug-in (in VST/Audio Unit format) specifically to generate the robot voice, which belongs to one of the game’s characters.

Experimental music: Artists from the avant-garde scene were involved in creating the soundtrack. For example, the well-known composer Chris Brown wrote jazz compositions for The Sims 2 and its expansion University.

Jazz accompaniment: Notably, the Big Band Jazz parts for the game were performed by musicians better known for their work in free jazz rather than traditional bebop. Kauker enjoyed giving such artists creative freedom, allowing them to bring elements of contemporary art into the project.

Sound philosophy and Simlish: The use of the fictional language Simlish in the series (including The Sims 2) was driven by the need to avoid repetition and not impose a specific narrative on the player, since players themselves define the meaning of the game. To efficiently process the enormous volume of voice work for 12,000–15,000 animations, the team created their own recording and editing applications based on Max/MSP and Jitter, significantly speeding up the workflow.

The overall approach to the game’s soundscape is built on “philosophical abstraction,” where sounds (such as birdsong) are tied to specific states of the game world or objects, creating a dynamic and living atmosphere.

RU:

Fan.Prosims — библиотека игр The Sims 3, The Sims 2 и The Sims

[video-games-are-bad]

The myth of player agency is actively detrimental to game design.

[blazehedgehog]

Is it just me or are there more artists and animators who write more about games (and their design/production) than programmers, in their free time? Would you know any programmers who do? I'd like to hear their side of the coin.

Not to diss any programmers out there who are reading this, but I think it’s kind a left brain/right brain sort of thing. You have the term “programmer art” because programmers aren’t usually artistically inclined. Software like Unity gained popularity because it allows artists to create games with minimal nuts and bolts programming.

Which is to say I don’t know if many game programmers are the writing type. Not in the way others may be, at any rate. They do exist, though, but they’re rare. The only one that jumps to mind is Andy Gavin’s blog – former of Naughty Dog, he wrote a very long, very detailed history of working on Crash Bandicoot like 6-9 years before Polygon did their retrospective.

I’d say maybe check Gamasutra, but I suppose that’s the rub, right: I’m sure lots of programmers have written lots of very interesting things on Gamasutra about how they made their games, but usually it’s programming advice. It’s technical documentation. Research notes. They’re heavy on statistics. Programmers writing for other programmers.

Interesting and valuable if you can follow along, but not exactly main stream. I mean, yeesh, look at John Carmack’s twitter some time. How much of his technical tweets do you understand? Even he’s written for Gamasutra – see what I’m saying? Written by a programmer, for a programmer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just thick reading.

Artists and animators talk more about how they express the story or whatever. That’s more easily digestible for somebody who isn’t imminently versed in computer language syntax and pages of technical jargon.

[vinodrams]

Gamasutra plays Gigantic with Carter McBee & Vinod Rams

Gamasutra - Twitch

Did a Q&A interview thingy with Gamasutra this morning. We talked about the making of Gigantic and other things. Check it out if your interested in the vidya game making! 

[l-1-z-a]

On this day in 2004, EA released The Sims 2 . In this classic postmortem from Game Developer magazine, Lucy Bradshaw and the Maxis team recount what went right and what went wrong during development.

[ransm]

There's probably a direct connection between western game journalist xenophobia and the widespread critical praise for Braid, a 2D platformer that feels bad to control and empathizes with J Robert Oppenheimer.