Blog for Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor at GarageGames.com

Mode 7 Games Blog Launches Monday Night Live!

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2006-12-11T18:53:01+00:00

Greetings urchins.

Firstly, I haven't posted on Garage Games for a while which has been deeply remiss of me. Normally I'd come over here to wax lyrical about Determinance's sound and music, or to post stupid pictures of Ian's cats, both of which were entirely viable pursuits, I'm sure you'll agree.

I wasn't able to come out to the US again this year for a variety of reasons, including doing a talk for Nottingham's Gamecity (http://www.gamecity.org/) If there are any UK indie developers out there looking for a hub, or a good place to meet people, pester the organisers to do another Gamecity next year. UK indies were there in force, as well as indie-friendly publishers like Zoo Digital Publishing - it is a truly awesome event and a load of fun.

Anyway, that basically means that I didn't get to meet anyone on the US end of things in this particular locale, which is a massive shame, but I'm sure I'll get over there at some point in the future.

I'm here to announce that there will be more intensive and interesting blogging activity over at the Mode 7 Games Blog (http://www.mode7games.com/blog) in the near future. I'm planning a series of weekly columns entitled Monday Night Live. These will be speculative opinion pieces - hopefully want to stir up some discussion. In the past, I've written for a few games mags, including a piece in Edge, and it's nice to be able to do some more involved and thoughtful writing for the Mode 7 blog - we'd love some more subscribers so get over there if you're interested.

Determinance is progressing apace - this excites me.

Why the big games blogs are insulting you

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2006-05-29T21:49:15+00:00

Apparently, there are no indie games.

That's right, none of your projects exist and what you're doing with your time right now is entirely impossible. So impossible, in fact, that no journalists can be bothered to find out it.

This Slate article, which is actually pretty balanced if a tad shallow, has been mentioned on sites like Joystiq and Kotaku with a much more negative spin.

I find it pretty insulting that people aren't willing to go out and look for indie projects to cover, but this must mean that we're doing something wrong with our marketing. We need the games media to be heralding a new dawn of indie gaming...we want hyperbole in the other direction!

I'm trying to start a backlash by speaking out in public about how offensively stupid this kind of coverage is. We need to start getting people to notice our games and fast.

If you see any more posts like that, go and comment on them - put these journalists right and start to drum up some interest in indie gaming - it will benefit the whole community. Read some of the intelligent writing that's out there such as Kieron Gillen's guide for indie marketers and put it to use.

The best marketing occurences we've had so far have come about through actually talking to people about the game - PR is really the way to go. Find a polite intelligent way to approach news sources and remember that you're doing them a favour - be succinct about why your game and company are interesting and it will pay off. You won't get it right every time, but you will find people starting to talk about your game, and that's what everyone needs.

Greetings from the Happy Sun Planet of Determinance

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2006-05-04T16:32:26+00:00

Hail fellow mutants,

All embace the radiant joy of Summer!

Summer has finally come here at Mode 7 Towers, and for that reason production on Determinance was momentarily halted for Ian to destroy my living soul at tennis.

We have been working hard on getting our publicity machine oiled, out of the garage onto the driveway in preparation for the extensive rounds it will have to make in the coming months. It's a fairly odd contraption, consisting of a bit of PR drive by yours truly, coupled by some rickety struts to our amazing Blog of Supremacy.

The blog currently has some Determinance dev updates, and a couple of opinion articles by Ian: the ones on net code and IP in games will probably be of most interest to you guys. We're planning a bit of an expansion in this area, and we'll hopefully be chatting to some other developers soon, as well as doing some mini features.

If you're interested in DT's progress, the blog is certainly the best place to find out info right now. Come over, subscribe and hurl insults at us in the comments thread. It's guilt-free fun. Also, our forums still continue to exist with wanton abandon, so you can mosey over there and hang out with such regulars as dr_pineapple and the ineffable DROR.

We recently had some really nice support from the journalist Kieron Gillen, who, as you probably know, was instrumental in the early success of a certain outfit called Introversion. We're hoping to get the chance to meet up with Kieron at some point soon and give him a preview of DT.

Also, we had a thoroughly worthwhile meeting a couple of nights ago which I will now detail in pictorial form:

On the dev side, Ian and I returned to the sound once again to sort out some levelling issues. This has all been tidied up now and we've properly signed off the sound. We have some problems with openAL (no, surely not) which have been driving us both completely mad, but hopefully we'll find a way out of that particular dark cave fairly soon.

This afternoon, we'll be doing some more tweaking of our dynamic music system so that it responds the way we want, and after that I'll be returning to marketing.

Doing this has given me a serious appreciation for the hard work which a lot of marketers put into their jobs for no thanks whatsoever. Everyone hates marketing and PR, considering them dirty and morally suspect activities. Let me tell you right now, there are almost NO journalists ANYWHERE in the world in ANY specialist field who don't get 98% of the information they use to live and breathe from PR people. If there was no PR of any kind, you simply wouldn't know about any of the cool things you know about and we would all be living in ditches hitting ourselves across the forehead with pebbles.

A final thought - if your game dev isn't thriving right now, go outside and walk around for a bit. It's lovely outside, apart from the wasps/tigers (delete where not geographically applicable).

Also, if you live anywhere near to the Crazy Bear in Stadhampton, UK...in fact, even if you don't, you should certainly go there. There is nothing about that place which is less than awesome.

Keep it street, indie games community.

A logical progression

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2006-01-05T15:04:28+00:00

As expected, things have been quiet in the musical wing of Mode 7 Towers recently, with tension mounting about some forthcoming exciting news.

However, we return to the cold and grey afternoon which comprises reality only to brighten it with the information that you can download ANOTHER track from the soundtrack to Determinance for free here.

Apotheosis was a really interesting track to do, and it helped close the project in a fun manner. I'm proud of it and I hope you like it.

Matt Sayre of 21-6 Productions was recently featured the article I wrote for Computer Music magazine in the UK, and already some new musicians have turned up in the forums looking for work. I can imagine that it's fairly difficult for musicians and designers to get together and get on the same wavelength, but I'd seriously recommend anyone looking for music in their game to head over to the music forum first before they poke around the internet trying to license stuff.

I'd like to urge any newcomers to try and behave themselves while waiting to get some work - it's probably best not to upset your potential clients.

It would be nice to set up a kind of showreel site, where composers could post their work and developers could browse for the kind of soundtrack they want - anyone interested? I don't have time to do this myself, but I'd certainly help out.

Edge had a feature on game music this month, which was pretty well done, but still slightly demonstrated that games mags aren't entirely sure how to deal with game music as a topic. I think that higher-profile scores will help with this in the future, but some kind of new journalistic approach is called for to cope with something as multi-faceted as a game score.

Friday Sep 16 18:59

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-09-16T18:59:10+00:00

Interviews for Computer Music

I've just posted a thread about the feature I'm writing about music in the independent games scene for Computer Music in the UK. This is a BIG DEAL as the magazine has a huge distribution. If you'd like to take part, please read the thread and email me.

Thursday Sep 15 12:07

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-09-15T12:07:23+00:00

Ilicet

Hello Garagegames, just dropping in to report that the musical dwarves and I (there are still no musical dwarves) have now FINISHED and mastered all the music and sound for Determinance.

Alright!

I still expect a call to come and tweak stuff, but basically the stupid thing is done and I am celebrating by sitting around my house listening to this song by my good friend Binster. He's only started writing music relatively recently, but I really love the sounds he gets out of Reason. Someone hire him to do a game score right now.

On a software front, I've had a total nightmare getting Ableton Live to do what I want in the last two days. I still hold to my opinion that this build is generally stable enough for use, but the process of patching and sorting out the various joykilling factors is something I've asked Ableton about and I hope they're going to address in a forthcoming interview for my site.

The Music4Games article I wrote made it onto GameDev, causing people to argue in a completely futile manner about something Matt Sayre said (go Matt!) which is pretty cool.

The "big-shot" game composer interviews are yet to come out, but I expect they'll be up on the site relatively soon.

I have jury service starting right before IGC, so I may not be able to come out and meet people, which will be a massive shame. We shall see, however. Onward into the noble future! As I'm relatively free now, I will probably be doing some more writing, and maybe looking into doing some freelance music stuff - if anyone's interested give me a buzz - paultaylor@nervoustestpilot.co.uk

Friday Aug 26 16:46

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-08-26T16:46:29+00:00

Two radios in my bathroom

Greetings from the East Wing of Mode 7 Towers where, for the last few weeks, myself and the musical dwarves (there are no musical dwarves) have been wearing out our little violins working very hard on the menu music, closing credits theme and one more level track. It has been stressful and rewarding yadayadayada.

I have two radios in my bathroom. You know why? So I can listen in stereo. HA HA HA HA what?

The menu music has a kind of Ulrich Schnauss-y breakbeat feel, whist the theme is a kind of bumptious 80's cop show gone wrong for some reason. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm overjoyed with Threshold, the latest level track. Ian tells me it'll be paired with a very cool-looking level which we've just received. We're trying to pursue the aggressive, melodic thing further, and this last track was one of the most difficult to finish so far. Working to a scheme is kind of hard once you've done it about 11 times; you start struggling for variation. Anyway, I think we did it.

I wish I could show you some of this stuff but it's all a bit NDA. If Ian wants to jump in and slip you all an MP3 then he's more than welcome but that's up to him.

In my last blog, about fifteen years ago, I praised the little socks off Ableton Live 3. I have now upgraded to 5 and I am incredibly excited about its potential efficacy. However, and it's a big dangling qualifier of a however, the giant chronic evil kind of moth/fly/sabre-toothed-tiger hybrid spectre of bugginess has reared its fearsome mandibles and literally nibbled away at my tattered sanity. Ableton, for the love of all that we hold dear, please release a patch SOON or I will personally fly over to Germany and hax0r the next version so it can only play funk.

That's all that needs to be said about that, so (and I mean you, Ableton forum fanboys) you can all shut up about it now. It's still usable in most cases. Sure you have to copy a few files around to stop Live arbitrarily deleting them, but stop whining like kittens and make some music.

Speaking of kittens, here is a short video of a cat knocking over The Dame Was Loaded which expresses my feelings over the last three weeks:

...which would have actually worked if our star wasn't more interested in just continually rolling over and over like a total moron. Yeah, way to go. The whole GarageGames community was waiting for you to knock over that game and you missed your shot. I had to fill out the whole thing with stupid music, pictures from last time, and a screenshot. I'm not going to draw a development metaphor, because that would be crass. Oh, whoops.

I've just finished my article for Music4Games.net. Thanks to Manuel Marino and the inimitable Mr. Matt Sayre for their much-valued contributions, and sorry to everyone whose work I wasn't able to include. I hope I've written something representative of the way people on GarageGames feel about music.

The Music4Games guys are doing some worthy stuff, and I've been told I might have some journalistic input into a kind of round-robin-style article featuring people like Jesper Kyd, and some guy called Hubbard at some point in the future, which is a huge slice of cool.

And finally, I played our game properly for the first time last night. Exciting times. It's weird when you've been doing this thing you don't really understand for ages, then you sit down at a computer and realise that you've actually made something which is part of something fun. Hmm.

Friday Aug 19 12:36

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-08-19T12:36:14+00:00

Thanks

Thank you to everyone who has offered to submit material for my article. It's now complete, so I can't take any more submissions.

I will return to post more lucidly very soon.

Friday Jul 29 19:33

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-07-29T19:33:22+00:00

A summons

I'm in the process of writing something for Music4Games about music and the indie games scene, specifically with relevance to Determinance. It should be an interesting thing to do, and I'd like to incorporate anything else anyone has to contribute. Please email me if you're interested.

In other news, I've just finished playing part of the soundtrack at the Truck Festival, a seriously enlightening experience. If a room full of people can't jump up and down to your soundtrack, then you should throw yourself in a ditch.

Monday Jul 18 18:59

Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor — 2005-07-18T18:59:30+00:00

Oh, Johnson, I am a man on the edge.

Last week at Mode 7 Laboratories, we finished the implementation of the sound content for Determinance, and I would definitely count this as one of the hardest but most rewarding periods on my part of the project so far.

Here's Ian typing things which end with semicolons and swearing, whilst Tristan renames a bunch of wind sound effects. What you cannot see in this picture is the programming wing lambasting me for my virtually incomprehensible filenames. You crazy guys and your OpenAL. I have a distinct recollection of endlessly typing "iamanidiot(true);" and then staring at the screen whilst NOTHING HAPPENED. I think it was this kind of thing which sent me over the edge and eventually compelled me to walk around the house giggling and repeating a line of in-game dialogue ("Oh, Johnson" if you must know) over and over again. Ian tells me he does this every day (the programming, not the giggling). Just three such days caused me to end up like this:

Since this is a .plan file, I thought I would share something of potential technical merit and extol the virtues of one of the finest pieces of software to grace our humble earth: Ableton Live.

Now from this fascinating image, you can perhaps glean an inkling of the extreme lengths to which we were forced to extend ourselves in order to create something which sounded acceptable. This Live set is my homebrew sword-swipe generator: I can define the amplitude and bandpass filter envelopes of the swipe sound, as well as controlling EQ parameters and giving the whole thing a nice chunky compressed feel using Live's in-built compressor. Live's level of realtime control remains untouched; it's my weapon of choice when I do live gigs in my other life as a dance musician. But for these purposes, armed with my trusty laptop, an old but sturdy copy of Cool Edit Pro, M-Audio's only soundcard that actually works (the Audiophile USB) and Germany's finest performance sequencer, I feel relatively invincible.

I'm just using a burst of white noise for swiping as you can see in the above. I did a similar thing for a water effect which combined pure noise with a strange spraying sample I downloaded from Sonomic. More on that in a second.

And now, a short interlude while you watch this video of a cat knocking over The Orion Conspiracy I made when I was starting to crack up.

Right, we're back, and it's time to talk Sonomic. Now, these people have an interesting sound library at their beck and call; there's some pretty esoteric stuff going on in there if you care to look. But sites like this don't seem to know their purpose, which is providing the raw material for sound designers to recombine into exciting shapes. Their purpose is not to sell canned, over-processed crap at an extortionate price; their purpose is not to sell pre-mixed "sci-fi" synth stabs which someone has made by pressing middle C on a JP-8080 preset and recording it onto a Minidisc; and their purpose is, essentially, not to give me anything I could make on my own. Even if you've never touched sound-editing before, trust me when I tell you that cool, abstract, electronic-sounding sounds (like GUI or menu effects) can be made by you with free software in under thirty minutes. There's a million free soft-synths out there, there's Goldwave and Audacity (we even used Goldwave for some quick processing on Dt's sound just before we stuck some of it in the engine), so there's no excuses any more. Stop buying "electro-wibble-5.wav" from Sonomic and force them to concentrate on what they do well: sourcing well-recorded organic samples us mortals can't/can't be bothered to get for ourselves. We don't all have the tenacity to mess around with big diaphragm mics and condoms to record splashing (and I promise you that has been done in the past, but thankfully not by me, although I did consider it at one point) so we need a company to provide a service. Oh, and by the way, Sonomic, that service does not include resampling your preview sounds to ridiculous bitrates so everything sounds like a fat kid rolling in crisps. How am I supposed to evaluate whether a sample is even slightly worth the price you've allocated to it if all I can hear is the insolent burbling of compression artefacts?

And finally, every sound engineer knows that his reward is another human being hearing his creation for the first time and taking it through his ears and into his heart. That moment when the eyes light up, the first trembles of a smile breaking out across the rigid neutrality of a face in concentration:

Despite this, doing sound in collaboration with whoever is heading up your project cannot be recommended more. Instant feedback is vital; there's nothing lamer than spending a week working on something, having it stuck in the engine, and then realise it sounds like a bin falling over. Also, us creative types need a lot of encouragement, beer, incomprehensible American sports talk-shows, and virtuosic demonstrations of how bad we are at Soul Calibur.

All I have to do now is finish up some more music, which has the potential to be mildly less traumatic, but in this business, anything's possible. Any day now I'm expecting to be called up to make the sound of a seal falling through a multi-dimensional rift heard by a player waiting to join a server, but it's my job, no, it's all of our jobs to be prepared for that.

(P.S. Markup Lite is apparently having an issue which makes it unable to generate either an apostrophe or an ellipsis. I'd like to apologise on its behalf, but I can't, sorry, CANNOT.)