Category: Blog

I had dabbled in Unity back in 2013 and got familiarized more later when working with friends, but the licensing issues, laggy UI and the hefty process of dealing with Unity hub and endless revisions that made things just worse just exhausted me. I had been looking for an alternative for a while. Being code-wary, I kept looking for easy solutions, but each came with their own limitations. Looking through engines with visual scripts brought me to Godot. I didn’t enjoy the visual script that much, but I stayed for the engine itself!

I’ve been working with Godot for a few weeks now, and I’m loving it!

Only 60+ megabytes, no installation needed and opens and loads projects in an instance. Completely free and open-source, no royalities, and with a pretty easy to learn Python-like scripting language (GDScript, you can still code VisualScript, and also in C# and C++). Once you get used to the elements and the signals system, it’s so quick to create a mock-up!

I’m almost finished with my first app, a language app for Hambaazids and it’s been a great journey, I think I’m really getting into the whole game dev thing!

 

Looks like I’m going to get involved in a new game (working title “Dot”), currently under production! It’s a fast paced geometric action game, and I will be working with a skillful, talented and inspiring team, working on generative procedural music and sound effects! Exciting!

I’ve been developing this one for the past 8 months now, and it’s finally seeing the light of the day! This album really put my skills as a producer and as a song writer to test! And we have our label Epoxy up and running too!

New works with Hambaazi association!

Last week I did some simple animating for the song Yek Shab-e Toofani.

Also finished producing one new song. This is the first from the new series of lullabies. Sang by Lili Parsipour, It’s based on Alice Tegnér‘s “Tula hem och tula vall” and inspired by the lyrics in Pippi Långstrump. It was a breath of fresh air working with a proper singer rather than a toddler, haha! I also did some simple animation and video editing for it with the images provided by Mahsa Fathi Sjöberg.

Fasching club has a weird placement of their stage along the side of their quite long and narrow venue, so the huge band barely fitted on the platform, actually the third violin had to stand off stage, she was on fire though, so I did not mind! We happened to be standing right behind the drummer, so I would argue that I had the best spot I could have ever ask for! God damn this band was HOT! This was among the few live performances I’ve witnessed fairly sober, and the music itself transported me just as well as if I had been off of my rocks! The melancholic vocal duo, the colorful brass section, the songs lasting around 20 minutes and everyone getting the chance to improvise, the insane breathtaking conducting of the mastermind Mats Gustafsson, it was all truly “jazz up your ass”! What an era to be living in!

It was quite an experience getting to see the people at the top of their game in the world of game sound!

The event started with a presentation from the audio director from Tencent games all the way from China, Cheney Wu, where he talked about mobile games, their huge and growing chunk of the video games market, and techniques for adapting and optimizing big screen console games to small screen mobile environment, with examples from Call of Duty mobile and Arena Valor.

The second part of the event was the presentation of Perttu Lindroos, senior audio programmer, and Martin Bussy-Pâris, senior technical audio designer from the audio team of Remedy Games from Finland, with examples from their impressive work on their games Quantum Break and upcoming games Control. Quantum Break with all its time manipulation seemed like a big enough of a challenge for the sound designers, which they had masterfully came over with designing their own in-house granular synthesis utility to deal with smooth stretching and playing sounds and music backwards and forwards, and oh boy, the game was packed full of audio elements placed all around the environment! But the major Wow-moment for me came with their second part of their presentation about Control in which the environment is itself constantly in motion and change, so they had to come up with even new tools like a spinning ray-casting system to deal with the huge array of sound sources, many not actual ones and more related to feels and the emotion of that particular area. Equally impressive was their attempt at generative music composition, with real time synthesizers and varying time signatures and beat accents.

Boy, I’ve got a LOT to learn!

I just started going through Audiokinetic’s Wwise-101 Certification Course. I meant to go through this a few months ago but I had to fix my computer and internet connection. It works on a FPS early Doom style game called Cube. There’s also a Limbo sample available to work with which is the icing on the cake for me! It goes through quite a slow slope learning curve step by step, and it’s easy to follow, we’ll see how it goes!

I’ve played around with FMOD before but the people I worked with didn’t care for it. The licensing of these middle-wares is a major hassle for companies. It’s dependent on the size of the project and the budget of course, but they would much rather receive WAV files and put all the implementation of the sounds on a tedious process of me dictating the elements to a poor programmer, rather than have orderly quality sound design from the get go, which is a real mess, I know. Both FMOD and Wwise have pricey licensing fees for big budget projects, but both have options for low budget indie projects too. Both offer an endless free/evaluating chance, but things get tricky when you want to publish the game.

FMOD indie license (budget under $500k) is limited to one free game per year, and Wwise will set you up with a free license for non-commercial projects. Wwise has the added bonus of having a full starter course right on their website so that’s my first go to, but I’ll get back to fully exploring FMOD after this. It never hurts to know more! To power!