Life at an underground game company.
We’re hiring!
06 months ago
by Azrael
in Double Cluepon
We have a couple of positions we’re going to be filling. The second one is still being put together, but you can find out about the first one. We’re looking for a contract animator.
A couple quick blurbs on Exploitative Engineering and Ethics.
06 months ago
1) Adamatomic has his say here.
And..
2) Tim Rogers hit the nail on the head here, with a pile driver.
I ask the simple, and honest question, when it comes to ethical and moral values in game design.
Could Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, be considered a “game” for Pavlov, the Dogs, both or neither?
- If it is a game, why is it so hard to accept that a lot of F2P games are engineered to provoke a conditioned response from the people who play it?
- If it’s not a game, then why is it so hard to accept that a lot of F2P games are engineered to look like a game, but are in actuality simply very pretty condition/response systems?
Why is it, some folks have such a hard time understanding that there is a difference between something that is fun, and something that is psychologically engineered to elicit a response?
And before you start in with “people have a choice”…you’re ignoring the last 100 years of scientific research into getting people to do things counter to free will. Choice can be directed, engineered. There’s a reason why psychological warfare, propaganda and push polls , and even Three Card Monte and The Shell Game work. I get why people use “Free Will” as an counter argument here…we like to believe we’re always in control. We have trouble as human beings, admitting and accepting that we can be manipulated, that while we have reason, and logic…we’re also animals…
Now, if you think psychologically engineering conditioned responses from people is in any way ethical when it comes to game design, and contributing positively to the art and mechanical design of game play…please do us all a favor…find another industry. Or rather, go back from whence you game: wall street and brokerage houses. Those are the places where mathematically and scientifically engineering money is accepted practice.
Just my $0.02.
How Music is Composed for EK
06 months ago
Hey, it’s my first post up here on the DC dev blog. If you don’t know me, I’m Chatto, EK’s Music Director. My job here is to create the soundtrack for EK and make sure it sound BADASS. The whole soundtrack creation process can involve many individual processes, such as composition, instrumentation, arrangement, and tweaking many knobs/mixing. The method I use for making a completed track consists of creating a base, composing around it, and concurrently adjusting knobs and sliders for the mixing process. Also I sometimes mix in some performances which adds some extra steps to the process.
The type of mood I want to set for a track usually comes first. If an EK battle theme were a person, this is what the “mood” on their face would look like:
What NINE THOUSAND? I had to do the reference...Did you see..did you see what I did...there?
For example, if I want a very mellow and atmospheric track, I may start by actually composing first with chord progressions mixed with a harp-fashioned riff and a recessive melody. If I am creating fast paced battle music, I may start with a base of rhythm and percussive effects. The reason that I use a base is because there are 4 main components that determine the mood of a song: Rythm, Atmosphere, Melody, and Instrumentation. Rhythm(or lack of) usually affects the pace of a song. This would definitely be a factor if you were composing a battle theme as opposed to a surreal environmental piece. Sometimes you may want to even add changes to tempo and beat in your piece, but that’s actually part of what I would do in the arrangement process.
When making a base, I focus on the conceptual side of the music. The next component in a base is atmosphere. A sculpture artist may use a certain material for their piece. For example, clay. Clay has a certain texture and look to it. It will affect the aesthetic of the piece a lot. If they used metal, it would affect the piece a lot more different than clay. The atmosphere of a piece is also slightly related to instrumentation and positioning. If you close your eyes and listen to a recording of an orchestra, you can get a sense of where instruments are, as well as how they change the atmosphere of a piece. Oh, I actually have a really good example of use of atmosphere in a piece:
This piece has a very calm atmosphere to start, and then changes when the piano comes in slightly, then goes back to being calm again. This is mainly caused because of the “ringing” pad sound Yoko uses. This piece however, has a bit of a different atmosphere:
There is a pad in this one as well, however, it has a different sound to it which makes the atmosphere slightly less calm and instead gives it an atmosphere of beauty and wonder. This one kinda makes me want to explore. It’s better to have a clear concept of where you want the piece to go unless you want a big clusterf- of music buffet that has all the sounds you like, but no coherency. Without any coherent theme, you’ll end up with something that sounds like mashed potatoes rather than a baked potato.
The next component to a base is melody(or lack of). If you want to compose music for a part of the game with lots of exploration, you generally want the melody to blend more closely into the background. I’d want an environmental piece to pack most of its power in the instrumentation and rhythm. The benefit of not having a dominant melody is that people won’t get annoyed by a “catchy” melody that plays over and over again.
The reason that melody can be annoying is because our brains are very good at picking out melody. Eventually the brain will memorize the melody and say “hey it’s that melody playing again” and will try to tune it out. If you’re wanting to create a good character theme that IS memorable, you’d want to have a very dominant melody. This is slightly related to one of my pet peeves about games with Generic Korean MMO music:
This flipping song plays every time you double click on a monster.
Some good old C&H
Alone, this is a good composition, however, it absolutely wears down quickly when it plays EVERY TIME YOU ARE FIGHTING IN THE GAME. Generally this is not a song I would want looping on my media player forever because of the strong repetitive melody. However, I’d definitely be just fine with a song like this:
Some less annoying and less repetitive music (Notice the lack of headache when put on loop)
The fourth thing that is important for a good base is instrumentation. You want to create the actual sounds you are using for the piece. For example, fast electric guitar with heavy distortion might not be the best choice for environmental music, but would fit great for a battle theme. Instrumentation is basically what sounds/instruments you group together. Some people will group instruments together that belong to different genres(eg. An upright fretless bass is from the Jazz era, let’s use one of those in a Jazz piece). However, conceptually you want to be in the middle ground to make a good theme. Conceptually your base should have a variety of styles in the instrumentation. For example:
Let’s consult the pro on how to successfully fuse electronica and Jazz. Mostly Jazz though.
The instrumentation of this piece contains funk, Jazz, and electronic sounds/instruments. They work well together and give the piece a unique feel. This is where the decision also comes in for whether to use synthesis, live recording, samples, or something else. Instrumentation has a lot of influence on the style of a piece as well.
The second half of my music creation process involves fleshing out anything that isn’t conceptual in the piece. This would involve adding alternate melodies, arranging, and lengthening the song. The actual arrangement process is what gives a song variation, length, and depth.
Usually I will take a long break in-between the conceptual and arranging stages so that I can “reset my ears”. Sometimes when I come back to a piece for arrangement I will like the concept, and other times I will hate the concept and tweak it or start over. I also want to give my ears a break before doing any mixing or mastering because ears will become less sensitive to changes in volume/pitch over time.
Another good practice I have when composing music is to study a piece of music that is similar to what I am composing for. I not only get inspiration from the piece, but I can also pick out the specific parts that make it a good piece. If I don’t care for a piece of music though, I usually will have a harder time with inspiration. True story one time I was given a JUMBLE OF A MOODBOARD as reference for a piece. I won’t say what/who this was for, but I imagine they picked the references by throwing darts at a musical dartboard and ended up with Polka, Screamo, and Country Western(see picture).
This is just one of the methods I have used for composing music. There are certainly other ways to compose and think about music, but this way tends to lead to really good results and is very unifying. It does occasionally lead to some atrocities of music, but I usually have no problem ditching bad ideas for better ones.
Anyways, that’s just about it for my post. It was a pleasure to post in this particular development blog!
A quick update on Emerald Kingdom & StoryTeller
07 months ago
We have props…
Props in storyteller. The RGB lines delineate the iso boundaries.
We have animations…
StoryTeller's animation importer and editor
We have our item editor…
StoryTeller's Item Editor. It's pretty straightforward.
Finally, we also now have areas…
Areas let us define custom events, sounds and ..... other surprises!
But, wait…there’s more. Two tabs in StoryTeller have yet to make an appearance. (Can you guess what they are?) While those are being worked on…the main focus right now is the alpha client, which is in full swing. Additionally, Xaphan and Uriel are burning the midnight oil on the actual beta artwork painting. What you see in this is not even the final artwork…we consider this rough work. We’ve been using what you see for internal test work.
If you have not already done so, now is the time to head over to the Emerald Kingdom website to sign up for Alpha testing. It’s rapidly approaching. While we have been collecting names for some time…we have not selected the initial tester list.
The definitive guide to why executable evironments are never “dead”
08 months ago
By: Azrael & Raguel
There has been much hay made of the recent announcement over Windows 8 Metro not having support for all plugins. While this is an interesting move by Microsoft, it’s not completely unexpected. Like many they are enamored over the promise of HTML5, and what it can do. However, this has re-ignited the “Flash is dead” idiocy across the internet.
Yes, it’s idiocy. Hand-waving freak-outery aside… I’ll go one further: proclaiming an executable environment dead instantly shows to the world that you do not understand the technical issues of the debate, in which case you should really stop posting. Or, to put it in the way Raguel put it: Flash has evolved, but the arguments have not. Talking about Market Share, native support for Execution Environments… irrelevant. Especially when it comes to the PC.
Why is this lunacy? Because, for the most part, true native support for outside code interpretation has always been something that is an add-on. The argument that “Flash is dead” conveniently ignores the fact that Flash is no longer just a program for making banner ads. It shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of how Flash has evolved, along with the Flex environment, AIR, and ActionScript 3.
To understand it, you need to understand the underlying components of what makes Flash, Flash:
- ActionScript 3 is an ECMAScript-based, compiled, Object-Oriented programming language. It’s syntactically very similar to its sibling JavaScript (another ECMAScript-based language).
- ActionScript is compiled into bytecode into a SWF file.
- The ActionScript Virtual Machine is the interpreter/run-time environment for compiled ActionScript programs.
- Adobe AIR, the Adobe Integrated Run-time, provides support for JavaScript, ActionScript, MXML, and HTML to be used to build Rich Internet Applications which can run in a browser or as standalone desktop applications.
Now, let’s take a look at Java:
- Java is a compiled, Object-Oriented programming language. Syntactically, it’s very similar to its predecessors, C and C++, and even moreso to its sibling C#.
- Java is compiled into bytecode, in the form of a JAR file.
- The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is the interpreter/run-time environment for compiled Java programs.
The similarities do not end there either. Here are some fun quotes about Java from 1998 (bold emphasis is ours):
-
JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness.
- –Anonymous at NASA
-
There are a few things that are in the way of Java becoming a well-established platform for applications. IMO, one obstacle is the CLASSPATH stuff. Another is the fact that applications are not as easy to install as native ones. Performance is a consideration too, of course.
- –Jose H. Solorzano on the advanced-java mailing list
-
Standards are, among other things, supposed to provide islands of stability with a minimum life of five years. Currently Sun seems to be shipping new (not entirely compatible) releases of Java every year. To my mind that is clear evidence that the product is not yet stable enough to be standardised.
- –Francis Glassborow on the SC22JSG mailing list
-
Sure, Java’s great for distributed enterprise applications, and maybe even for embedded systems, but it simply hasn’t lived up to its promise of “write once, run everywhere.” And on the Web, even the smallest Java applets drive surfers crazy as they wait for their Java Virtual Machines to load. That’s why many people turn off Java in their browsers. They’re simply unwilling to wait for something that isn’t that interesting in the first place. And let’s face it, the vast majority of Java applets on the Web are a drag. Most Java applets don’t do anything but look cool.
- –Fredric Paul
-
Java on the client doesn’t work, and we at Netscape have done an about turn on client-side Java in recent months. But on the server side, Java is taking off quite quickly.
–Marc Andreesen
-
So Java applets crash my browser, and the Java technology that’s supposed to be cross-platform plainly isn’t. A good portion of the blame for this surely belongs to Sun; the company has declined to release its hold on Java to an independent standards body, and Sun and Apple have been extremely late in delivering this so-called cross-platform technology to Mac users.If this is what Java is all about, I’ll take decaf.
–Joanna Perlstein
And on and on and on… But wait! Java is still in use practically everywhere. Java didn’t die then, and it’s certainly not dead now. Proclamations of it’s demise were, at the time, greatly exaggerated. Even if you count Microsoft’s attempts to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish Java. Java, in the mid to late 90′s was just as — if not more than — reviled as Flash is now. It was proclaimed dead many times. It was slow, buggy, inhibited performance of the browser, crashed browsers (and machines). Yet here we are today. Java is still around. Contrary to the worries of the pundits, it’s thriving.
Starting to see where this is going?
Now, let’s look at some other examples.
- Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language.
- Perl requires an interpreter, which is not included with Windows, in order to run Perl scripts. This must be installed by the user.
- It is also dead. Though the Perl is not dead campaign is gaining momentum.
How about another?
- Python is a high level, general-purpose multiple paradigm programming language.
- Python requires an interpreter which is not included with Windows, and must be installed by the user.
When you begin to understand the technology, you start to realize Flash is not just about the Flash IDE, creating easy SWF’s with tweened graphics for a banner ad, or a menu bar on a website. If you don’t understand by now that Flash’s core ActionScript is an Object Oriented language executable environment then you do not have the technical knowledge required to make a judgement on technology.
Alternative executable environments are a staple of modern computing. They almost never ever die. Proclaiming that one is dead is akin to announcing to the world, “I’m an idiot who does not understand technology” while wearing nothing but clown shoes and chaps. Think we’re wrong about this?
Try this on for size:
- While the original DOS was an operating system (and we use that term loosely) at the core these days, it’s a code execution environment. Good Old Games, Steam and others bundle DOS Box to run legacy games. While DOS is no longer supported by Microsoft, it still lives on to this day.
- Z80 Environments, which have a long and storied history, live on in the MAME Project. MAME is the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. Like DOSBox, it’s a legacy code execution environment.
- Many other computing environments have been virtualized and have homebrew communities, like Atari 2600, NES, and others.
These are examples of how environments to execute programs never really go away. But let’s get back to this argument over how a lack of native support somehow is a death knell for these environments. People who make absolutist arguments about technology are the ones who typically have no grasp of technology beyond their own limited scope. They suffer from a very real tunnel vision. There are dozens, if not hundreds of sites offering cheap Apache/PHP hosting. Does that mean Perl is dead? How about the Microsoft IIS server? Apache is still in the lead. Especially when you throw in Tomcat. Does that mean IIS is an ailing and dying duck? No.
A lot of the arguments made about Flash these days (Sadly, by many an Apple fan, and others who should know better) are the same as the ones that were being shouted out back in the 90s when Gil Amelio was at the helm at Apple. Apple’s dead. They’re not relevant, they aren’t used in business, Microsoft won. Without vendor and software support, Apple is doomed. Yet, look at where they are today. (Disclosure Note: Azrael was once a devout Mac head, who spent many years in the wilderness with a PowerBook, and other assorted hardware, and still has his Newton. Raguel laughed when Apple died and now lives on current Apple laptops, and owns a half-dozen other devices in the Apple ecosystem.)
The problem with absolutist arguments when you work in technology is this: they preclude you from understanding the most basic rule in technology, which is use the right tool for the job you have before you. It also keeps you from seeing something else: technology evolves and matures.
When you start talking about a lack of native support in this context…you already lose the argument. We have news for you: with every Windows machine any of us have ever owned, We have had to install the Sun (now Oracle) branded Java JRE/JVM to run the things we want/need. You’re often auto-prompted to do so. We have installed the AIR framework to run AIR Apps, prompted to do so when the things needed to run the apps are not there. Like TweetDeck (which is a standalone app, btw)…which have no bearing on browsing. Oh, and we install Chrome, Opera and FireFox. With Chrome or Firefox being often being selected as the default browser. We rarely, if ever use IE. So, native support is not an issue here when it comes to non native code execution environments. It does not matter what Microsoft does with Metro on Windows 8. The landscape is not changing much, if at all when it comes to running the things you want to run.
Flash/Flex/ActionScript/AIR are far from dead. They will continue on, in spite of the continued pining of people who have not one jot of a clue.
With all that said, there are a few people who have pointed out the flip side to the coin. Seantron makes a very good point: Flash developers should be doing more to “get out of the box” that is the Browser. The “What Games Are” blog asked, “So where does this leave browser based games? Has Microsoft just announced their doom?” rather than just proclaimed doom and gloom. They also pointed out, this affects all browser games that are not HTML 5. While Flash is a most favored whipping boy…where does the no plugin policy leave Unity? By some people’s logic… Unity must therefore be dead. But, hey… Unity is a development environment, it has a code execution environment too. It uses a plugin! It’s not going to die anytime soon, and neither will Flash/Flex/AIR.
In closing, remember… absolutist statements when dealing with technology are often the telltale sign of someone who does not, in fact, understand technology. While some things may be more immediately apparent than others, remember this: at least once a day, your browser receives an answer from Perl, and PHP. You’ve received the results of Python in your time. You use Java more than you’re probably aware of. Every time you hit Armor Games, you’re using Flash. Oh, and for what it’s worth: most Flash games these days are not created in Flash CS. They are created using the Flex environment, or other open environments, or with free compilers outside of Adobe’s sphere.
There are a lot of people who think minimalist websites laden with quasi intellectual prose somehow stand as an authority to all that is. In our experience, it’s these types that talk a great deal, but say nothing. They’re willing to tell you the cost of everything, but omit the value of anything that stands in the way of their meager, tactless (and often factless) argument.
Despite Microsoft’s positioning, and in spite of the wishes of many, Flash, and its various components such as Flex, AIR, etc are going to be around for a long time to come. ActionScript and AIR are maturing, and getting better. So is Python, and Perl. (we use all three here). We apply the tech that makes sense for what we do. We do not make sweeping, absolute declarative statements when it comes to technology. Nobody should. When you see people do this, remember…it’s a sign they do not understand what it is they are talking about.
Ja Mata!
EDIT: It seems Microsoft has indeed clarified this positon: “Open distribution: retail stores, web, private networks, individual sharing, and so on” will be allowed, Microsoft says. Metro apps, on the other hand, will be “Distributed through the Windows Store. Apps must pass certification so that users download and try apps with confidence in their safety and privacy. Side-loading is available for enterprises and developers.”
Which basically nulls the “flash is dead” debate. The debate over whether or not a company should have the right to control what you may, or may not install on a mobile device is a separate one, and is still raging hard.
