Category : Blog Post

One producer I’m working with for a machinima show has asked me to see if I can put in the “Wilhelm Scream”.  Neve having heard of that, I did a little research on it.  Apparently, its an extremely classic scream sound recorded decades ago that has appeared in many, many films to the point of cliché.  This, however, makes it all the more amusing for this particular scene.

If you are also unfamiliar with the Wilhelm Scream as I was, please see the links below to read further about it and its interesting history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream

http://www.hollywoodlostandfound.net/wilhelm/

http://www.theforce.net/latestnews/story/The_Wilhelm_Scream_77600.asp

Ever get the need for just a few sheets of manuscript paper to doodle a new tune on? Hop on over to http://www.blanksheetmusic.net and they’ll take care of you! This free site that I ran across allows you to customize the output for the number of staves, key signatures, clefs, etc. So get your free blank staff paper today!

As some of you may have picked up from Pat Hrabe’s (incredibly flattering) blog a few days ago, I have begun working with him on scoring the machinima web series “Hey, Shipwreck”. To return the flattering blog, I’ll go on record to say that the reason that I was attracted to the project was Pat’s great art and humorous writing! Great work, Pat! If you haven’t yet checked it out — it’s available at www.tubedaze.com. Currently, we’re making the videos available as DivX and WMV, but we’re looking into other possibilities such as Quicktime and possibly even a video podcast! (which, of course, is Quicktime as well…)

To get to the meat of this blog, however, I wanted to comment a little bit at what I’ve found to be an interesting and much different medium than scoring for video games.

Approach

In video games, music is typically looped and on the shorter side because that is both cheaper for the person hiring you as well as more space efficient for the game’s footprint, especially if its a downloadable product. However, when dealing with film, you can never write more music than there is film, but you’ll most likely write far less. Also, the material is always used in sync with the picture in the same way every single time. So, you can more precisely craft exact emotions or “hits” to exact moments in the film. This adds both additional impact to your music as well as to the overall film experience.
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Initial Design

For this title, Andy Schatz, of Pocketwatch Games, and I discussed some ideas for the music together early on. Andy knew he wanted the game to be “based in the seasons” and he had this idea of making 4 pieces of music, each that would play while a player was within a particular season. You are not actually positioned in that season for too long, typically, so the pieces had to be relatively short, but also interesting enough to grab the player’s attention and serve as an instant reminder as to what season they are currently in.

In-game screen shot of Venture Arctic

Additionally, they had to be cohesive so that there were common elements between them all so as to let them flow from one piece to the next. To make things even more complicated, we both wanted to be as organic as humanly possible and involve as much “local sounds” into the sound as possible.
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Hi everyone and welcome to my quick talk about sound effects in games. Hopefully this article can help you get started working on adding some noise to your game so that its not just some pretty graphics demo!

Spotting
To start, play your game. A lot. Stop thinking about the bugs you need to fix… what’s left to do… and definitely stop patting yourself on the back for your brilliant algorithm that took six days to create that works perfectly. You need to start thinking about “Joe Gamer” who doesn’t really care about your sleepless nights and who just expects a good time and great production values.

This can be very hard to do. If you need to, invite some friends over and have them play it. It’s always fun and a good experience to WATCH other people play your game and see how they react to it. Many folks do betas where they get written feedback — but nothing beats actually WATCHING someone play your game.

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