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All of you probably saw Jon Frisby’s (Mr. Joy, Inc.) post-mortem regarding his new game When Orcs Attack!

If not, you can read about it here:
garagegames.com/blogs/48969/13597

Before reading, I would highly suggest you download and play the demo as well — as you will get much more out of this if you understand what I’m referring to! Download it here:

mrjoy.com/games/6

As the audio designer for the game, there were several interesting things that happened during the development for this game that I thought others might find interesting and perhaps applicable to their current situations. For Torque users, however, your mileage may vary as WoA was developed on the Unity3D platform, so some of these “solutions” that we came up with may or may not exist for you and some additional ones may be available as well! In case you are wondering, I also did the two tracks of music in the game, but most of my post-mortem will be focusing on the sound design elements of the game.

What went right

1) (Pretty) Clear scope In all sound design projects for games that I work on, this can be a big issue. Knowing exactly WHEN to incorporate the sound designer at a stage where the scope is pretty well nailed down is key. Most sound designers are working on “per sound effect” price point as opposed to a “retainer format” (unless you are very rich and can offer health and dental plans…), so for the sound designer to produce extra sounds that you won’t actually use can become quite costly. This project, however, was well scoped and I was shown the project pretty late in development, so most of the major features were there and could be seen — so any additional sounds were figured out pretty quickly.

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Recently, I came across an article called “50 ways to increase productivity.” Inspired by this, I took a look at a few things that aren’t on this list that help me with productitivity in the studio. After all, the creative process can be lonely and tiresome and large tasks seem like they will never be completed. Here are my top 5 tips:

1. Use a paper-based desk pad. These desk pads are modeled after those large writing pads you see on easels in board rooms or “Win, Lose or Draw”. The idea is that you can make boxes around groups of tasks and then dilleniate the smaller tasks more frequently. Try to make those sub tasks about even in “time weight” so that you don’t have to work for hour just to scratch off a single thing! For example, don’t just have “finish mixing song A”. Instead, break it down and think about what you really need to accomplish with song A. Maybe instead you should have a few smaller tasks like “set trumpet part better in mix” and “adjust panning and reverb for more depth” and “edit bass part for better sync”, etc. It is extremely satisfying then to me to be able to cross things out as I go and see from a quick visual perspective how far I’ve come that day!
2. Put long term goals somewhere else, but still visible. The things on your pad should be ONLY things you plan to get done that day. That way, you can always go to bed feeling like you conquered the world today! For more long range things (with fat ambiguous names) I put these in various places, such as on stickie notes hanging like stray whiskers from my iMac monitor. It drives me insane, so I love the feeling of transferring one of those tasks to the pad for the day and tossing those out! (more…)

Several audio friends I know (Jeffrey Fischer & Dave Cebrowski) put me on to a different way of monitoring. The technique stresses the importance of allowing for headroom when working in an all digital environment.

To accomplish this, do NOT attempt to have your music “in the red” all of the time. Instead, calibrate your monitors so that -20 dB = 0 VU = 83 dB SPL per monitor. Then, I use the K-14 or K-20 monitoring system with my Precision Limiter from Universal Audio.

The wonderful part about this is that you can actually mix WITHOUT looking at the meter all the time! 83 dB in this system sounds plenty loud, so you know when things are “too loud”, and you just adjust. At the same time, peaks can be allowed because you have between 14 and 20 dB of headroom! (depending on which system you use). To read more about the K-system, designed by legendary mastering engineer Bob Katz, you can read this article on his website.

Enjoy and happy mixing!

On a recent project (see my last post) I ran into a situation where Logic Pro was literally stumbling and halting quite frequently giving me the standard (and far from helpful) “Logic is too slow error”.

However, I noticed that if I stopped and started it from the same spot many, many times it eventually played through just fine. How weird!

After much testing, I figured out what I believe the cause of this. This recent project had the following attributes to it:

1. I was running on my Power Mac G5/2×1.8 Ghz with 2 GB RAM
2. Most recent version of Logic Pro and Mac OS X 10.4.x
3. The project had some very long “songs” which were film scores, ranging anywhere from 5-15+ minutes per “song”. (I have multiple “songs” that then made up the entire project
4. The cues were all written in a classic “star trek” style, utilizing full orchestral sounds, though with sparse orchestration. Hence, I might have 40-60 exs24 instruments loaded up (many of them keyswitched samples from the likes of libraries like Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl) and Project SAM True Strike, etc.) so there was a significant amount of samples at my disposal.
5. exs24 streams samples from disk, but also requires a certain amount of RAM per exs24 instrument (around 8-14 MB, depending on settings and such)
6. I was using very limited “plug-ins” besides a reverb or two which was being powered off of a UAD-1 card (almost zero CPU hit) and was streaming the samples from a separted SATA RAID HDD, so bandwidth on that end should not be a problem

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Have you ever been confused by what an unbalanced or balanced audio cables is? TRS vs. XLR connector?  I found that the good folks over at Sweetwater have a really nice guide that’s worth checking out.  Enjoy!