brandonhigley.com

I chose not to hang out for too long after GDC ended on Friday, although I did camp at the bottom of the escalator for a bit to see who I would run into (Mike, it turned out).  The 2.5 hour drive home would not have gone well after a few drinks, not much sleep, and late at night.  I can say, though, that the evenings spent with Valerie, then Sandra and John, easily rank among the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.

Too many casual conversations at the lunch table turned into job interviews well before I was aware what happened, but I did manage to impress a few people, most likely due to my embarrassing lack of perception, and although I do sound a bit cynical, I am incredibly happy that I got to meet Erik, Nick, Tim, David, Mike, and probably more, in a setting where an evaluation of my merit happened without me being aware of it.  More job interviews should be ambushes.

LEVEL UP

I had business lunch for the first time ever, and got into an exclusive party for the first time ever.  Thank you for the notches in my belt, awesome people.

Now that I’ve followed up via email with most of the people I spoke with at GDC, and there were a lot of you, I need to plan out my week-after-foll0w-ups.  Get ready for some emails, world.

And, now that I’m back in Auburn, even though I do not feel like I am, I need to make my investment in my Audio Pass create a return of significant intangible value.  I need my reason for attending GDC to stick–a refocus on what my real priorities are–making awesome games.

Leonard J. Paul is telling us how he used just a few water sound effects in combination with a layering technique and an audio programming suite’s (FMOD) pitch, granulation, EQ, and level parameters to create many, many more sound effects that could be dynamically applied by the game’s physics engine.

It is similar to the techniques used in the racing games case study (in the more advanced examples), and in the game Limbo, and I mention Martin Stig Anderson’s talk because it was the very first talk I heard, giving my experience at GDC a nice bookended feel.

I had an interview over lunch with an old contact who may have an opportunity for me in the coming months, so if you are keeping score, that’s 4 for the lunch tables, and 2 for the Career Pavilion.

I would love to do something tonight to give GDC one last hurrah, but I also don’t want to drive home feeling half-dead.  We will see what happens!

I may have mentioned it in a previous post, but I have had lots of success meeting people by just sitting at any of the lunch tables in Moscone West and letting people come and go to and from my table, chatting them up while they sit.

Last night, I crossed paths with an old friend from college, and that gave me a fun night of food and drinks, and tonight worked just about the same, as two colleagues happened to walk by and invite me to dinner just as I was about to head for home.  It wasn’t as epic as the previous night, but I really enjoyed bonding with Sandra and John, a couple of composers, over Thai food.

Before that, I got to hear one of the shortest and probably most interesting talks of GDC: a case study of the evolution of car sound design in games.  It was such a specific are to discuss, but nonetheless, it was enlightening!

I am worried that I will make GDC sound boring, but I just want to express that I am comfortable, now.  Sure, my enthusiasm has diminished a bit, but that means that I can be a little bit less fanboyish, or at least focus that fanboyishness so it is contained to the Expo, but I don’t get butterflies before walking right up to someone like Jason Graves and saying, “Hey, I saw you get an award for Dead Space a few years ago.”

Unfortunately, I think today will be my only comfortable day, since tomorrow is the last day of GDC and I will be trying to savor everything I possibly can before it all ends, but I will enjoy my  contentedness while it lasts.

Now, time to (hoepfully) learn something about aleatoric uses of instruments in game scores.

The talk Digital Orchestration for the Video Game Composer may well be the most useful talk I will hear at GDC this year.  The information was applicable to almost everything I do as a composer, and there was a refreshing college-like quality to the whole lecture, starting with the lecturer’s first words: “Everyone have a seat; we have a lot to cover and not much time to do it.”

Speaking of college, though, I ran into my old friend Valerie at the Career Pavilion (then again later, but I’ll save that for the next paragraph), so we reconnected, but only had a moment to chat.  I did hand out my resume and some business cards to all of the developers with whom I believe I have a chance at working with, so I would call that a successful visit between talks.

On a later break, I employed my strategy of “Sit at the tables people use for lunch and talk them up while I pretend to be busy on my netbook”, and met two programmers who may be interested in working on EHSC, a sound designer who may be looking to employ a composer to round out his audio start-up, and two students working toward their masters who may have a fun and innovative game for me to contribute to for their final project.

LEVEL UP

After the Digital Orchestration talk, I contemplated going home and skipping the Game Developer’s Choice awards, but ran into Valerie again, so she brought me along to an invite-only party at the nearby Hanging Shield, and we got a chance to reconnect more than our hurried interaction at the Career Pavilion.  We even talked about working on a game together, soo…neat.

(Before I get into the main entry, let me start with easily the best moment of GDC so far: passing Martin Stig Anderson in the hall, and him saying, “Hey, you were at my talk yesterday.”  He recognized me because I spoke to him afterward.)

I am sitting among the press and press-delusional on the third floor of Moscone West clicking away about some lecture or another, some interesting Expo display, or some GDC Play demo.

I’ll be talking about Austin Wintory’s Journey vs. Monaco, Music is Storytelling.

The thatgamecompany composer talked about his creative process (sorry everybody) for his latest game and his upcoming game, both very different, Journey and Monaco (one an epic adventure of growth and development, the other an arcade heist game), but both processes were almost identical.

Journey took over three years to develop, and because he was brought in early, the composer was made a member of the team, unlike most development cycles, which save the sound for the very end and force the sound team to conform to the very established creative vision for the game.  He showed us three musical samples from early, middle, and late development, and emphasized that his music evolved because “it is impossible to work on something for three years and not develop as a person, to complete an arc of your life”, and I can only think that during typical development cycles, it hinders the composition process to allow most of the development team to grow throughout development, but not the composer.

Monaco’s portion of the lecture talked more about how his handling of music cues in Journey carried over to his next game, another development and evolution, but most of the music he let us listen to he promised would evolve by the time the game was released.

It was great getting to hear an established composer talk entirely about music much in the way one of my college professors would at a conference for game developers.  The respect given to the craft at an event like this was refreshing.

The Audio Boot Camp (a total misnomer, by the way, because a large percentage of the people attending have worked on shipped games) borrowed a BAFTA tool, which involves a small group of speakers splitting up and drifting between a few lunch tables, allowing for an intimate Q&A session.

I got to speak with Alistair Hirst, who worked on Forza 4, Mike Caviezel of Sound Lab, and Scott (whose last name also eludes me) of Microsoft.

I didn’t get to talk with James Graves of Dead Space, but maybe later.

Martin Stig Anderson gave an amazing lecture on ambience as music using Limbo as a case study.  I learned nifty stuff about aural focus, relative dynamics, and lots of other things most readers won’t care about, but I absolutely do.  Next up is a talk by Jason Graves that he calls Games 101.

Obviously, Mr. Anderson did the audio for Limbo, but Mr. Graves did the music for Dead Space, and I actually met him a few years ago at GDC when he had just finished the first game in that franchise (fun fact: I also met Jason Hayes of World of Warcraft).

This is all part of the Audio Boot Camp, which will take up my entire Tuesday.  I hope to mingle a bit but I think that today will  be too busy for that.

“I sure hope I don’t forget anything.”

I can’t tell you how many times I have thought that over the last couple of days!  Having to spend a week in a hotel 2 1/2 hours away from my home without my shoes, or without my business cards, or my laptop, or some other item integral to my success at GDC has been giving me nightmares.  I made a list last week, though, and have been checking it every day to make sure it is 100% complete, so that should hopefully not be an issue.

Anyway….

The opportunity to meet new connections and reconnect with old friends at GDC is exciting.  Obviously, audio sessions like “Digital Orchestration for the Modern Composer” will be useful (although I may have covered some sessions in their entirety already in college, such as “Aleatoric Techniques”), but the people are why I wanted to go to GDC.  I am tired of working an hourly job that distracts me from making music, and I want to feel professionally fulfilled, and people help me get a job.

Less than 24 hours!