Sundays are for remembering the glorious sunshine you enjoyed but half a week ago, while looking out at eleven degrees Celsius’ worth of grey skies and drizzle. Did you know some people actually like rain? Imagine. The weather taste equivalent of forgoing a beautifully soft, Emperor-size memory foam mattress to sleep on a beach towel with some used needles poking out of it because “It’s more refreshing.” The ruin of humanity.
What was I.. yes, the Sunday Papers. Good words to read. There are some, of those.
Lewis Packwood, of our well-coiffed cousins at GamesIndustry.biz, published a fine investigation into the resurgent Australian game dev scene (a corner of which Austin Lancaster examined for us last year).
“The entire industry was wiped out,” recalls Sanatana Mishra, co-founder of Unpacking maker Witch Beam, who saw many talented developers leave the industry entirely. “My design mentor who taught me everything I know went back to being a sparky [electrician]. Most of my coworkers who were excellent at what they did left for America and joined companies like Blizzard. We saw a brain drain on a level that was unimaginable.”
Automaton’s Mohamed Hassan helpfully translated chunks of an interview with Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari on Japanese site 4Gamers, touching on the risks of big developers repeatedly making the same kind of game – something his team at Arc System Works is aiming to avoid with their new, very much un-Guilty Gearish action/RPG Damon and Baby.
“In current game development, localized staff involvement has become a common thing […] It’s very dangerous to spend decades doing highly specialized work, only to realize later that you’re no longer capable of doing anything else. You’ll find yourself at a loss when the project you’re working on hits a rough patch, and even if you quit your job, your chances of finding another one will be slim,” Ishiwatari explained.
Over at Aftermath, Luke Plunkett spoke to Marathon composer Ryan Lott and audio director Chase Combs about crafting the extraction shooter’s (to be fair, bangin’) soundtrack.
Ryan: Whether I’m scoring or writing a song, I often begin by designing simple instruments from various sound sources. In the case of Marathon, I did some design using fragments of the human voice. What I look for, whether it’s a cello performance, a voice or anything else, is the emotion trapped inside the sound that persists even through extensive manipulation. Because our brains are so attuned to the human voice, it is exceptionally fertile ground for pushing those manipulations further and further while still maintaining a sense of its origin.
This one, a three-way chat between The Game Business’s Christopher Dring, Kickstarter exec Asher McClennahan, and Ico Partners publisher Thomas Bidaux, primarily takes the form of a vid-podcast. But there’s an accompanying blog post, if you’re more of a text absorber, which covers the trio’s discussion on why Kickstarter remains a relatively little-used fundraising tool in spite of apparent past successes.
It’s hard to know the value of the items that developers may be giving away with free-to-play Kickstarter campaigns, Bidaux explains.
“You can have a hat or a cat or whatever, visual items, but the value of that is difficult to project. I know a video game is $20 or $30 or $50, because of that genre. But how much is a hat? $1? $50? You need to play the game to have that sense. People have done things where if you give them $50 on Kickstarter, you’ll get a $100 worth of in-game currency. But then maybe everything is super expensive and $100 is nothing?”
Part of me would like to never include anything about AI in the ‘Paps, ever again. A much bigger part of me loved this withering piece by writer and former engineer Niko Stratis.
I believe there are people who use AI as writers, and it is justified to their hearts by a need to be unburdened from the cruft of the form. They don’t want to perform their unbecoming labours, as the dirt of them that might irrevocably stain their skin. They want to be seen as writers because it sounds admirable on the tongue. How uniquely special it is to have turned an idea into something more. I have seen people say that they have great ideas deep within them, but they don’t have the time or patience or skill to get them out, to do the work no one wants to see. I have seen them argue that they deserve to be writers. As if there is work some people are owed by virtue of their desires. It reminds me of being told the work I performed was less than because I hadn’t tried hard enough to be someone better, who deserved more than my aching, dirty hands.
Music this week is Biffy Clyro’s Infinity Land, the otherworldliness of which I’ve recently re-discovered serves it well as nighttime driving music. It may also work for nighttime cycling, nighttime rollerblading, or nighttime ice skating, provided you have access to an open-roofed hockey rink.