8363 | A game audio blog

Among game audio professionals, independent contracting seems like the innest religion this season. At least four of my friends in the business have moved, for various reasons, from in-house to contracting.

I've thought about posting some articles here related to surviving independently. For now, I will start with the single most important bit of wisdom I've found online or in books. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, talks about overcoming the anxiety of producing consistently brilliant work:

I can't put it as well as she does, so view it next time you have 20 minutes to spare. I wish I could have watched this years ago. I hope it's useful to you as well.

This is probably my favorite title to have worked on. EA really innovated and took the time to polish this unique concept of blending platforming and puzzling. It's the type of game the DS was made for. The pixel art is fantastic and the controls are as fluid as Super Mario Bros.

I didn't compose any music for this title. My role was to take Gene Rozenberg's original music and convert it into sequences for DS. (This is basically the same type of work I did for Zubo.) It was challenging and rewarding, and both Gene and Kyle Gray were great to work with.

Hatsworth has a great metacritic score. I've put in a few hours and I'll say what everyone else is saying--go out and buy this title.

In preparation for GDC I have posted an updated version of the demo reel, with some new songs added. They are separated into pop/rock/electronic and orchestral.

I picked this up from WiiWare a couple days ago, and it does not disappoint! The tech seems to be limited to about NeoGeo quality, though maybe a bit above that for some of the parallax effects. It's almost like they made their own arcade system with hardware customized for the game, then emulated it for WiiWare. It even has slowdown when enough bullets are flying around, just like the NES and SNES versions. I think that might have been a side effect when it was first made, and kept in Rebirth as a gameplay feature--slow-mo to be able to handle the toughest dodging events.

The music and sound is great. The voices seem to be running from a DPCM channel or something and have that classic scratchiness. The whole game, including emulation, seems to fit in under 22MB (if my math is correct).

Download it and support this type of project. For those of you who didn't grow up with this style of game, the best advice is that you're not allowed to complain about unfairness. (This is by design.) Throwing the controller is OK.

Konami, please use this engine to make a new Castlevania game.

www.henryhatsworth.com

Props to 1UP for getting an interview with this guy, a living legend. You already know many of his songs from Contra, Castlevania III, and TMNT. What I didn't know before reading was that he designed the VRC6, a piggyback chip included in Castlevania III (Japanese version only) which added 3 more sound channels. There's a youtube video here if you want to hear a comparison.

He mentions the famous Konami Sound and how he helped develop it. Data suggests he could be the father of the single-channel echo, basically a technique to fill up gaps between melody notes with quieter elements to simulate delays and reverb without using the second channel.

I am still dying to know what tools were available to make these songs. Right now I am picturing the soundtrack as a catalog of punch cards.

We Track Down The Composer of Contra NES [1UP.com]