8363 | A game audio blog

When I last wrote about motivation and the Friendship Method, I touched on the importance of accountability. Basically, working alone for extended periods slowly drains your motivation, no matter how interesting the project. By keeping in touch with other people on the project, it helps you get through the tough times.

Two weeks ago, Matt and I launched an experimental way to keep this up over the internet. I would say the results have been astonishingly good. This is somewhat geared towards contract game audio, but can be applied to any situation where the team is geographically separated.

Here's how it works:

1. Set up a Campfire account. It's free!
2. Create a room and invite everyone on your team. So far, my team is only two people: Matt and myself.
3. First thing every work morning, log in and enter a few lines about what you're going to work on today. (This is borrowed from 37Signals' own method.)
4. Enter the first task you plan to tackle. "Beginning revision on Project X Song Y"
5. When you finish, enter a line for that. If you take a break, enter a line for when you went on break.
6. Repeat until it's time to quit for the day.

Here are the benefits we've discovered from this setup:

• Share your victories as you knock out task after task
• See where your time is going. Campfire logs the time of each message.
• I found it very easy to get into the groove even on those mornings
• Great way to quickly exchange ideas without using email or the phone
• When you get stuck on a task, you can call for help
• Campfire even allows easy file sharing. When you finish a song, you can send over an mp3 to show it off.
• You don't even have to be working on the same projects as your teammates. Just find colleagues who have a similar work pattern to you and could benefit equally from this system.

The results?

The last two weeks have been the most productive since my visit to Texas. So if you can't work in with your team members in person, this is the next best thing.

If anyone else tries this, let me know how it works out.

Wouldn't this make an awesome music composition interface?

“[Video game composers have the] best life for a composer ... I’m just one man, but I know many TV composers and none of them are happy with their job.”

- BT quoted in Siliconera

This is awesome--I know working in games we have dark times and long hours, but my guess is that the level of political strife is a lot lower in games than it is in TV and film. Not to mention the turnaround time for music on a weekly television show. I remember Alf Clausen talking about composing for The Simpsons on a DVD audio commentary, and he said the turnaround is only a few days from the time you get the locked picture to the time you need to deliver it scored. And it happens every week! Doesn't sound like you can take much time off with that schedule.

I'd like to know more of his thoughts on game composers. Obviously by best life he doesn't mean the most glamourous... nevertheless, it's refreshing to get a reminder that I am very lucky to do what I do for a living.

I hope BT gets into games. He has the talent and versatility, and I think his experience with live performances could bring a lot of cool ideas to reactive music. The biggest hurdle for him is overcoming his pop star status, which could pigeonhole him to just doing trance style music for sports games. With any luck he'll get in on some original IP and won't have to worry about that.

Since Squarespace allows you to make these cool Amazon lists, I decided to make a quick list of my favorite current-gen games. Anything I should add to it?

When I first heard about the ability to insert your own custom music into X360 games, I feared for my career. I mean, in the handheld world, that's about the worst treatment you can get from your audience: "I turn down the volume." "My mom makes me turn down the volume." "I listen to my own music on my iPod."

And now Microsoft has made it easy for everyone to do this on their home console?

I decided to give it a shot with Geometry Wars. As it turns out, Axel F is a fantastic themesong for this game. Let's all be honest and admit that it secretly makes you feel pumped up and powerful--just the emotion you need for battling hordes of glowing lines.

This isn't so bad.

Then last week I decided to experiment further. Dead Rising is a brilliant audio package as a whole: outstanding voice acting, understated scores for the cutscenes, action packed pop songs for the boss fights, and eerily quiet romps through zombie-land after dark. After my third retry from the save point (trying to get past Sean the cult leader), I decided to have some fun and put on Michael Jackson's Thriller. Not only did this ease the pain of having to retread the same point of the game, but it added hilarity to the zombie fighting and eased a bit of the game's tension. I think I did better when listening to this music than I would have otherwise.

Could music be a special type of powerup in games? Hmmmmm...

So in the end, I appreciate the ability to overwrite the game's music with your own. It takes some pressure off of those of us who have to make a song that lasts all 40 hours of game time, and also affords the player an opportunity to do a bit of music direction. It shows how big an impact music has on the scene.

So overall, good job Capcom on Dead Rising audio, and no offense for my personal choice in background music.

Steven Velema just wrote to inform me that his new site is live and features a demo reel and new design. His demo features some really great tunes he did for projects we collaborated on.

My layout's going to look pretty bland and... corporate compared to his. So I have my work cut out for me.