Tag: blogtober
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You Can Do Anything Except That
Some of the most disciplined people I can think of are fiction writers. To assign yourself the task of producing hundreds of pages of compelling original content — consistently, on a schedule, while also being your own harshest critic — seems like it would require not just a creative muscle but a kind of self-discipline…
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Sound High Level Thoughts
A few months back I was given the opportunity to put together and present a talk to the whole studio about game audio. Keeping it under twenty minutes meant staying deliberately high level — which was harder than it sounds, because audio is one of those topics where every thread you pull leads to three…
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Staring At The Summit
(Blogtober Day 12) One of my favorite books that delves into the history of game development is Ken William’s “Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise And Fall Of Sierra On-Line.” Despite the rather long name and somewhat busy cover, this book was a pretty fun and interesting read. Ken Williams and his…
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Momentary Stars
(Blogtober Day 11) Something that took me a while to really understand in sound design and mixing is how to find the restraint that is sometimes needed to not make everything loud all the time. It’s a super easy trap to fall into, and boy did I ever fall into it early in my career.…
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Applying Vonnegut To Gaming Pt. 2
(Blogtober Day 10) So picking up from yesterday’s Blogtober entry applying some creative writing tips from the late author Kurt Vonnegut and seeing if I can apply them to game development… “Start as close to the end as possible.” This is an interesting one to try to apply to game development as there can be…
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Applying Vonnegut To Gaming Pt. 1
(Blogtober Day 9) Something I maybe have a bad habit of doing is finding a concept, opinion, or soft guideline talked about in one creative industry and considering how it might be applicable to game design and development. I’ve done this almost subconsciously for a while and I tend to keep it to myself these…
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A Few Approaches To Directing Actors
(Blogtober Day 8) Directing actors is a skill on it’s own. Although admittedly it can often seem simple particularly if your only experience witnessing the skill in action is in a professional studio, with well experienced actors, and a talented director who has been working with them on various projects over several years. That is…
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Generic Can Be Another Word For Useful
(Blogtober Day 7) Generally speaking voice over is recorded in sessions ranging from 2 to 4 hours in length. Typically the aim is to record somewhere in the ballpark of 200+ lines in 4 hours, although depending on the complexity of the lines that number could go down, or even up as high as 400+…
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The Best Book I’ve Read All Year Scares Me
(Blogtober Day 5) I’ve been on a non-fiction kick for the last handful of years. Occasionally a science fiction or fantasy novel has creeped it’s way into the queue, but I would say nine out of ten books I read are non-fiction. They tend to be about history or on skills that I wish to…
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A Straight Line (The Most Direct Narrative Design Structure)
(Blogtober Day 3) I’ve been a several narrative design and writing for games talks, and I have read over a dozen books covering the same topics, and I’m always amazed how, in my opinion, how little narrative design is actually ever discussed in any of them. There is often focus on writing, and branching dialogues…