Catch Up
I’m LONG overdue another blog post (I am terrible at doing this with any regularity, apologies for that!), so here it finally is!
So, job-life. We finished up development on LEGO: Harry Potter Years 5-7 a few weeks ago, and with it, finished crunching. All in all, we were happy with how the game sounds and everything we got into it, and I even managed to fit a bit of time into the schedule to try and get the mix consistent throughout the game.
We’re now working on a new project, and of course I can’t say anything, but it’s exciting. In terms of audio we’re currently planning what we’ll need to create and what we can do with the tech we have. I’ve also been getting to grips with the in-house tech (didn’t have time on Potter) and learning about how we memory manage all our assets. I’ve also been spending some time crafting prototype ambiences from a combination of streaming a base track and having randomly triggering sound emitters loaded into the environment. Needlessly to say, it was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to actually do it for some of the locations in the next game.
On the tech side of things, we had a long meeting with our ninja audio programmer about new features we want and we have some great stuff in the pipeline which should hopefully be with us soon. It’s been tremendously satisfying to be able to link articles from places like Altdevblogaday and Gamasutra to him and have him talk about how possible those things are with our tech/timescale. Hopefully with our next game, we should have some cool little audio tricks to show off.
Outside of work, I’ve been recuperating from crunch :) although now I have more free time, I’m wrapping up my freelance contracts and starting to pick and choose my projects and how I use my time a little more carefully (the joys of a steady income :) ). Rotor Games have a title coming with FX from me and music from the very talented Steve White which I’m keen to see finished, and I just started working on an album’s worth of material based on stuff I’ve stockpiled over the last few years of my life. It’s guitar based and kinda poppy, so might not be to everyone’s taste, but I’ve always wanted to finish these songs and put them out. For that, I’m going to be providing all of the backing, and everyone’s favourite YouTube-ing singer Sabrina Valenzuela is on lyrics and vocals duty. As soon as I have something to report on that front, I will!
With the free time I now have, and the freedom to choose how I use that time, I’ve decided to return to the programming I started in Uni. I’ve got a C++ book and 2 audio programming books and fully intend on at least attempting to get a basic a foothold on the audio programming ladder, if only to better my understanding of what we can and can’t do at work. If it goes well, maybe I’ll think about attempting some audio utilities :)
