dangstudios

[dangstudios]

Getting Into “The Zone” - Part 2 but from a different person

What’s up chunks, its Perrin, coming at you with some real talk not at all like my last post about using Microsoft Word to create paste or something. I read through last week’s post by Dorian and what they talked about really resonated with me, so I’m gonna try and respond to/continue with this topic. “The Zone” is that magical space you get into where your work is productive, fun, and rewarding. But it takes a lot to get yourself into that space, and there are days when you just don’t feel that winning combo of inspiration, motivation, and fun. So how do you make sure you can do productive work even if you aren’t feeling all of those things?

MOTIVATION AND INSPIRATION Dorian talked last week about inspiration and I want to follow that up by looking at motivation. As an example: for most of September I’ve been very inspired to work on DANG! related stuff like our twine game Siren’s Woods. On the other hand, for most of September I’ve been very motivated to play Destiny 2, upgrading my gear and grinding my way to the higher levels. Inspiration is that flow of ideas, or that feeling that you have a really cool idea. Motivation is being willing to put in the time and effort to further those ideas. Each is very important to the other.

FINDING YOUR WORKSPACE Where you work is as much a place as it is a mindset. For me, moving downstairs to the living room for brainstorming/writing/modeling has been very helpful. I’ve turned it into a place where I work, while my room is a place to relax. On the days when I have to work in my room (I like my desktop better for complex modeling) I try to go and work on something not digital downstairs first before heading back up to model. This way I’m still in my downstairs working head space even though I’ve gone back up to my room. Also, don’t underestimate the power of beginning your day with offline work - a notebook or sketchbook. Computers are a huge source of distractions for me, and its much harder for me to resist when I’m trying to get into a workflow than when I’ve already been working on things for a little while.

GET SOME DAMN FRIENDS IDIOT In the text below Dorian spoke about collaboration and isolation as two parts of the creative process, and I agree that they’re two very distinct segments fo synthesizing ideas. However, isolated work doesn’t have to be completely detached from other people. Right now as I write this, Sam is next to me on the couch busting away on IO prefab stuff. We haven’t said much to each other and we don’t have to. I can’t speak for him, but having another person down here sharing my work space has helped me stay focused and keep my mindset.

MY COOL IDEA ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE I have lots of cool ideas, but once I have an outline or I get to the end of that first inspiration-fueled thought process I get scared of the details/implementation and I just... don’t do it.

But uh, do it anyway. Even if you’re scared.

No for real. Fucking take an hour to poorly write out a scene, make a bad model, or script really shitty code. Because you can just... get rid of it. Last week I made some models for IO and I was hit with the usual I’m a bad modeler/How do I do this/Oh god modeling sucks thoughts. Then I just opened Maya, made a shitty soap dispenser, deleted the whole thing, and made a better one from reference. I don’t find this to be unproductive because it ended in a good soap dispenser, and no one ever saw the dogshit first one.  And maybe making a terrible version first is upsetting - so have some fun with it. Before I fully deleted the soap dispenser I extruded every face until it was a horrible 3D spine monster and my ape brain thought it was hilarious. Failing is a huge part of learning, and you can’t be a better modeler/writer/etc if you don’t make crap and then understand how to improve it.

WHAT IS WORK? The big question. The loaded ass question. The question I don’t really have an answer to. I spend a lot of time feeling like I don’t do as much work as the other  people of DANG! and its something that really cuts up my self esteem and just straight makes me sad. So here’s a couple things I consider to make myself feel less sad.

1. People do different work than you. Man I’m sad that I didn’t make some kick-ass concept art today like Janice did. Well you’re not a damn 2D artist. Man I’m sad I didn’t write some AI code today like Sam, or make music for IO like Ben did. Bitch you don’t know how to code and you also don’t know how to write music. None of these people spent their day writing or working story because that’s your job Perrin. And if you want to get better at those things then fuggin learn on your own time. Your skills are valuable, and you should focus on using them.

2. GOOD WORK IS NOT CRUNCH. Don’t spend 12 hours a day slogging away on something without breaks. You will die. You will be exhausted and hate everything and have no time to be a person and enjoy your damn life. Accomplish goals in realistic time frames you set for yourself. If its a big project, you’re not gonna finish it all in one blowout work session. Spread it out, keep at it, and finish.

3. Knowing when to switch up tasks. I had writing this blog post scheduled for tomorrow, but I wanted to do it after the two hours I just spent doing Twine stuff, and I could afford to move things around, and it’ll feel good to finish this. 

4. Realizing work is work. I know this answer kind of sucks but its pretty damn crucial. Work most of the time isn’t all that fun. Even with creative work, even when collaborating with your friends, there are parts that just suck and make you feel like you aren’t “In Your Zone”. You gotta buckle up in your mind and say “no matter what roadblocks I hit or how much I wanna turn my 15 minute break into 4 hours of Destiny, I said I would do these things today and I’m going to do them”. It’s kind of a weird way of building trust with yourself.

OKAY I’M DONE Even with all of these things - sometimes I’m just not motivated or inspired. But I’m building a space to work and cultivating discipline so that when the inspiration does hit I’m not struggling to find the motivation to execute on it. And maybe just being in that space can be inspiring. Just remember that if you’re doing work - find time to not do work.

[dangstudios]

Getting Into “The Zone”

Hey all of you DANG!-likers, (DANGlings? DANGlets?) it’s Dorian! Unless you’re some sort of celestial deity, you know that creating something from nothing is sometimes difficult. The creative process is like a largely uncharted territory -- you might have an idea of the general outline of it, but the specifics are yet to be found and often different every time. At least for me, “sudden inspiration” is infrequent, though when it strikes, the feeling is much like that of bowling a strike -- swift, explosive, and often quite loud. But most of the time, coming up with ideas is a lengthy process that requires (in various degrees) isolation, collaboration, and mutation. Today, I’m here to tell you about my methods for inducing some manner of creative vomit, and hopefully you’ll be able to use or alter my methods to fit your creative style!

The first thing I usually consider when trying to get in a creative mode is my environment. The ideal creative setting for me is one free of distractions, orderly, and comfortable. Here’s what I do to set up my space:

Block out some time! -- Set a time on your calendar for brainstorming and stick to it! It’s easy to convince yourself that the ideas will just come to you without any effort, but honestly, coming up with something novel (and more importantly, usable) is a single-minded effort that really requires you to stop playing Fortnite.

Keep your space tidy! -- I find it hard to concentrate when last night’s ramen is staring me down with crusty, dehydrated pea eyes, so I try to keep garbage out of my space. I also have the permanent items on my desk arranged so that they’re within reach, but they don’t dominate my field of vision. (Also, while cleaning your room makes for excellent, semi-productive procrastination, try to have this done before you start the time you have blocked out for idea-smithing.

Have cataloging equipment on hand! -- I usually use a pen and sticky notes or a sketchbook for bouncing ideas around in my head, but use whatever works best for you! Whiteboards are also great, especially for a collaborative brainstorming session. I try to stay away from computers when trying to brainstorm, as my attention often drifts over to email or tumblr. I recommend keeping a pen and paper in multiple places around your room so that when random inspiration does strike, you’re ready to capture it!

Set the mood! -- Do the personal things that put you in that idea-birthing headspace! For me, that means a few things:

Dim, sometimes colored lighting. If the lights in my room are too bright, I find myself just focusing on objects in the space. Dim lighting allows me to zone out and retreat into my Mind Palace for a bit.

Music! I often listen to ambient, downtempo, or vaporwave when trying to come up with ideas -- usually something without a vocal part. Be sure to put on something that’s not too distracting, nothing that really demands your full attention.

Lie down and chill out. This one might not be great for easy sleepers, but I like to lie on a couch or in bed -- it’s where I’m most comfortable!

At this point, you should be primed to clear your mind and let the ideas flow! My prep strategies might not work for everyone, but I hope they facilitate the creation of something cool, like a new flavor of ice cream, or a gritty detective story about middle schoolers.

[dangstudios]

Javascript Sux

Hey all, it’s Fuller again, back to describe the most annoying time I’ve had programming in months. The Patreon game this month is a prologue to a Twine game that may or may not be continued further in the coming months. Twine is an easy-to-use tool for writing narratives and interweaving branching story paths. However, Twine also allows for Phaser.io projects to be run alongside it, which is an engine we at DANG! used in school. It was perfect: what could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah, it’s in Javascript.

The first step to making a brief interaction for your Phaser project is to copy someone else’s half finished code first. This way, the project loads up on it’s own and you don’t have to slog through how the engine works again. This is a pro tip that I always recommend.

Once I’d yoinked!™ my team member’s code, it was time to get to work. This meant switching out the art assets for the scene I was working on, which meant I really just had to rename some stuff, no brain power required, the perfect task. Next I had to put those art objects in the correct location on screen, using my tried and true technique: keep guessing until you get it right. This is literally what I did. I ended up with numbers like x = 190, y = 454 for the coordinate of the arm. Surely there’s a better way to do this, right? A good question. Of course there is! Write some code that moves the art object along wherever your cursor is, and whenever you click the mouse button, it says the current coordinates of the mouse. This allows you to align up your assets and record the perfect coordinates! But I didn’t do this, that’s just what a smart person would do.

Next I needed the arm to swing up to toss the pebbles, which I guess is a spoiler. Huh. OK sorry to spoil but this is what I was working on and now that I’ve written it I’m not legally allowed to erase it (that’s how writing in pen works). Now you could do this by rotating the arm but you need it to rotate around the correct pivot, which is called an anchor. And again, use the patented technique of guessing until you find the perfect spot.

Well now that the arm moves, the pebble has to spawn and start its arc at the release point. Again, a smart person would use the same technique as before, but why be smart when you can be lazy (that’s right, we’re gonna guess again). Next we gotta do a little bit of physics simulation, so I made up numbers for the acceleration of gravity until it felt right, which ended up being 1 (the result of hours of science).

Now here’s where Javascript really got in my way. I made this slick additional pebble movement for when it dips below the surface of the water, and needed to add a splash. Now the splash needed to be at the location of the pebble when it hits the surface of the water, but still have the pebble continue to move afterwards. And here’s where Javascript is awful. Whenever you assign a value in Javascript (of a class object), it is passed by reference, which means if you change the value of the original, it will also change your newly assigned to variable as well. This meant that the splash would continually move with the pebble as it sank underwater and while it looked kinda trippy, it mostly looked dumb.

This took most of a day to find a work-around for, and it’s just stupid. No other programming language works like this, and no programming language should work like this. It’s nonsensical. Ultimately I had to create a copy of the pebble, and have the copy sink while the original stayed put, this way the splash wouldn’t move as the original no longer moved. It’s ridiculous. It’s nonsense. It’s Javascript.

[dangstudios]

How to Stay Motivated

Hey, Janice here, unfortunately without the answer to the title of this post. Last week I gave some tips about self-care and how you can try to maintain some sanity while transitioning into a new stage in life, so now I can look back at my baby self and laugh at how positive and hopeful I once was. Don’t get me wrong, the things I talked about still hold true and have helped me so much, but life is a little more complicated than that.

As a creative, I find myself struggling to be satisfied with my work and myself. There are so many things I’d like to do, so many mediums to try and so many ideas I’d like to communicate. However, there are just so many things that tend to wedge their ways into my plans, like time, money, and mental state, just to name the main ones. I found it especially hard the past few months to manage working on professional work at the same time as my own personal pursuits. I ended up not being able to work on my own stuff as much as I had previously imagined and it really…sucked. Looking at the lists of things that I wanted to try, the things I wanted to accomplish and then realizing how much time had already passed really hit me. Was I not managing my time well enough? Am I just not cut out for this? Is this worth the sacrifices? I thought a lot of unhealthy things, which really ended up killing my motivation in a lot of ways. And although I don’t think I’m out of this funk just yet, I do still have some takeaways.

FOLLOW THROUGH

This might be THE most important takeaway on this list. No matter what you’re working on, even if you start hating it, complete it. Tossing something out midway because it isn’t turning out the way you want it to is basically giving up on improving and any possible sense of accomplishment. I am definitely guilty of starting projects and writing lists of things I want to do, but not finishing them, either because I forget or I find a new interest and that FOR SURE makes a dent in my progression as an artist. There truly are only positives to finishing projects even if it turns out less than you would’ve hoped. For instance, you’ll have something to show for your time, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment, you’ll learn from it, and now you’ll be able to move on to something new without regret or that nagging feeling of unfinished business.

FOCUS

Narrow down your list of to-dos to something that is reasonable. If you’ve been carrying over something to every new list for a few weeks now because you keep hoping or thinking that you’ll do it… think about crossing it out. It’ll probably take a load off your shoulders and you’ll be more likely to focus on things that require your immediate attention. I actually heard this on a podcast called “Being Boss: A podcast for creative entrepreneurs” and definitely related.

TRY NEW MEDIUMS

Of course, not to a point where you have a bunch of unfinished projects, but it does help to vary your work when you can. It’s helpful to find new things to be motivated by when you’ve been working on the same project for a long period of time. Just be careful not to let it detract your attention from your main focus too much. But I do find that looking at different kinds of art helps me strive to get better at what I do.

Basically, don’t drown yourself in thinking about things that you could’ve or should’ve done. JUST DO.

[dangstudios]

Music that is and isn’t you

Hey all, Ben here. So last week I wrote a piece of music with the intention of it being one of the themes for the game we’re currently working on, IO Interloper. The piece is meant to describe an idyllic fantasy that a character has, yet really only exists in their mind, so I tried giving it a dreamy yet far off quality. Now I don’t think the music I've written is bad, but I am conflicted about how much of the music is just me doing me rather than me doing IO. Did I make it dreamy just because I like dreamy music, or did I make it that way because that’s really what’s best for the game?

This led me to start thinking about how a musical score that’s meant to be an accompaniment to some other piece of media can also be a personal expression of the composer. What I mean by that is how can a piece of music I write to be in game “X” also be a piece of me without compromising its function as accompaniment? When you’re trying so hard to make sure that the music your making fits the tone of what it’s meant to accompany, how much of you can really be left in it? And is the music better if you just focus on making it suit whatever it’s being scored to, or is something added by letting the music go where you want just a bit? 

To start with, here’s an example of some broad music that I think is getting the job done. Though it’s not my favorite, it is describing what’s happening: action is happening and it’s intense. The music is doing exactly what you’d expect for the moments it’s accompanying, but are there specific qualities to this music that make it belong to Titanfall? Is it telling me something I can’t already figure out from the visuals? And even without all that, is the music at least giving me the composer’s unique voice? I’d have to say that the music doesn’t really succeed at offering any kind of nuance or suggesting some kind of unique voice, but it’s Titanfall, what’re you gonna do. It gets the job done, and that’s about what you expect from a game like that.

Now, here’s an example of music that I think is awesome and is completely attached to what it’s scored to. This amazing John Williams music is the perfect accompaniment for the scene it’s scored to. I feel like I can practically visualize the entire story of the scene without needing to see any visuals. It stands out, it’s got personality and it works perfectly. It’s completely in service to the scene and at the same time 100% John Williams, but is it really an expression of John Williams’ feelings at the time he wrote it? I doubt it. Is it telling me something I can’t already get from the scene. Not really. The music feels too close to what’s being depicted to suggest something about it that I don’t already know. Now don’t get me wrong, because I still think this music is masterful, but it just isn’t suggesting something deeper then what I’m seeing on screen.

Pushing things a bit, here’s some music that I think is suggesting the feeling of the action on screen but also belongs a little bit to the feelings and interpretations of the composer. Now if you haven’t seen The Illusionist, you should. It’s a great movie in no small part I think thanks to Philip Glass’ score, although the awesome cinematography doesn’t hurt. Now, while Philip Glass gets a lot of crap for doing the same thing again and again (which he does), at least the thing he does is his thing. What’s more is that by balancing the music between Glass being himself and matching it to a picture, Glass creates something that adds a unique angle to the movie that wasn’t already present from the images, and here’s a video of him saying exactly that.

And lastly, here’s some music that is almost completely doing its own thing. This song sounds like something Burt Bacharach could’ve made on his own regardless of the movie, but does that cause it to not mesh with what’s happening on screen? Nope, it works perfectly. This is a movie that takes the singular voice of the composer and uses it to raise the emotion of the scene well beyond what is just happening on screen by suggesting more then what is seen. Now I suspect that this was a case of the filmmakers seeking out Burt Bacharach because they wanted him to do the thing he usually already does and then maybe cutting some parts of the film to the music, but hey, it works.

So, is there an ideal way to make the music? Not really. All any film/game composer can do is whatever they feel is best, and if that’s completely giving themselves and their music over as pure accompaniment, then that works perfectly well. Just as well is if the composer feels inspired by the material they are given and then writes some music more in their own voice. 

But then what happens when the music being made by a very individualistic composer no longer works with the thing it’s being made for? Well, then the question is how great can the distance between the music and the scene become before they are completely disconnected? And more importantly, is that a bad thing? Well, if the thing that needs some music is a familiar take on old tropes, then I’m of the mind that the music shouldn’t stray too far from what’s being depicted. But, if the thing is a slightly more nuanced piece of material with lots of hidden subtext and deeper meanings, then the composer should be allowed to do their own thing in order to offer an emotional interpretation of the material that isn’t immediately apparent from the actions being depicted (here’s some Jonny Greenwood as an example).

So, no, it’s not always best for the music to fly off in whatever direction it pleases without regard for what it’s meant to accompany. However, letting the music do its own thing a bit will almost always add some extra spice by suggesting feelings that aren’t already being described by the material that’s being scored. It allows the music to enhance the visuals without leading them around on a wild ride. Still though, sometimes, just sometimes, letting the composer do whatever they want can make everything one thousand times better.

[dangstudios]

Tool Time

Hey! It's Sam again. I write a lot of code, and as someone obsessed with trying to make things efficient (read: make sure I have to do as little work as possible), one of my favorite things to program are little tools to help us develop things. Unity makes this pretty easy with some custom editor scripting -- I won't get into the nitty-gritty details, but I thought I'd show off a couple of little tools I've made recently, talk through the ideas behind them, and finish off with a few tips for designing this kind of thing.

So, one of the windows you'll use the most in IO Interloper is this network map:

It's an easy way to see where particular devices are in the level, which ones you've accessed, and what their IP addresses are. For this to work, it's also necessary to show where walls are, and mark different rooms (otherwise, it would be nearly impossible to get your bearings). For the demo, I basically just took a top-down screenshot of the whole level and drew over it in photoshop to make that map image. That was pretty cumbersome, and every time we moved a wall or something I'd have to carefully redraw it in the right place. What we really need is a way to draw a map directly on top of the level right in the editor!

Something like... this:

This tool lets you draw walls and labels without leaving the scene view. It also lets you draw triangles, which is helpful for putting a background "fill" in interior areas. Really, it should let you draw any kind of polygon shape and automatically break it up into triangles, but that would be a pretty obnoxious thing to have to program (remember, my whole goal here is to avoid doing work). Instead, you just have to connect up the triangles yourself. Good enough.

Once the game loads up, we use this data to automatically draw lines, text, and meshes in the network window. Much simpler!

Ok, here's another example. Often in IO, you'll end up looking through a bunch of cameras at the same time. This is pretty expensive to render, so we need to make sure it's as fast as possible. One of the ways we're trying to pull this off is by having essentially only one material for the entire 3D part of the game, and only one 16x16 color pallete texture. Rather than a different material for each color on an object, we have a single material and we shove the UV coordinates into whatever square of the color pallete we want*. That's a little technical -- if you don’t get it, don't worry. The point is that we need a way to modify 3D models in the editor to change what colors different sections are.

*well, actually, we're storing UV data in the vertex colors, since we need room for both "lit" and "unlit" color coordinates. RG BA = U1V1 U2V2.

Here's what that looks like:

A lot is happening when you click on those colors! The editor immediately duplicates the mesh, changes the UV coordinates (vert colors, really) for each vertex of that section of the mesh, saves it as a new asset, swaps the old model out for the new one, and saves the changes to whatever prefab you're editing. We could do all that by hand if we really had to, but it would be a complete nightmare. That half-second would be at least 15-20 minutes of tinkering.

I have a few takeaways here, if you want to jump into tool development yourself:

1) Don't go overboard. I joke about being lazy, but sometimes making a cool feature for a tool takes longer than just doing that part by hand. It's important for a tool to be simple and intuitive, but it's alright for it to be a little clunky as long as your team knows how to use it. We don't have a huge number of levels, so it's not a big deal to have to manually connect those triangles for each of them. I can use the time I'd spend making a complicated polygon-splitting algorithm working on the actual game.

2) Performance sort of matters, but not really. It's not a huge deal if your tools are slow (within reason). These aren't commercial products! I could probably cut down the half-second wait time after you select a color a lot if I really wanted to, but why would I? No one outside of the team is ever going to touch this weird janky stuff. It's fine!

3) Just make sure "undo" always works. Please. Seriously. This is the only important one.

Good luck!

[dangstudios]

Getting the Most Out of Your Writing: Welcome to Word

Good Morning everyone, and welcome to another seminar on Getting The Most Out of Your Writing. I’m your host Perrin, and this week I’ll be starting you all off with an introductory course in writing. Whether you write fiction, non-fiction, scripts or prose, I’m here to give you the latticework you need to get started. And that latticework has a name - Microsoft Word. Here is my DANG! approved, August 2018 course on Word 2016. 

More like Word 1016. Ugh, take me back to the printing press.   

Somewhere down in your toolbar you’ll see this icon: This is Word.

Click on it to launch the program. If you can’t find it anywhere on your desktop then I am sorry. You don’t have Word.

Once clicking, you will get this screen:

This is what we writing veterans call “The Preparation Screen”. Here you will prepare to see Word for what it truly is. If you feel you are ready to begin, click the “Blank Document”. All the other ones are pointless. You don’t need to take a tour - I’m already taking you on a tour right now. If you need to make 10,000 resumes well there they are. I’ve never clicked on the Accessible Template Sampler. It tempts me, for I hope after clicking it the man and his dog will emerge from my computer and then there will be a dog to pet. But I also fear that one of the numerous background taxis may also emerge and crush the man and his dog.

This is what a new blank document will look like:

Now this is your canvas (metaphorically) and you can pretty much go hog honk from here until the sun collapses - but hold back your wretched excitement. As you can see at the top of the screen is a bunch of damn hoo haw. This is where the brains of Word lie, and uneasy are the brains of Word.

Under the home tab you have the Usable Features. Things like fonts and font sizes. Paragraph settings. Font color. Um, a clipboard. Over on the far left is where Word stores the paste. The little crossed out ‘abc’ in the font tab I believe erases the alphabet, and the two x’s next to it change the box art for DVD copies of X2: XMen United. You’ll be spending most of your time here in this section.

Next to the usable stuff you have all this vermin shit. The only thing here that I’ll mention here is the ‘dictate’ button on the right, because holy yuck. Yowza.

Next to the home tab is the Insert tab. Here you can immediately make Word fill out the new document with all of Wikipedia. You can also place pictures or insert ONLINE pictures; distinguished as such because they are on-line. Or make a thousand tables. Add some shapes.

The rest of the Insert tab is a meaningless pile of rotted code. Just looking at it is making me tired. If you wanna put math in your Word file it’s there I guess.

AH!

This is the layout tab. It basically lets you say what parts of the document you DON’T want to use. I like to set my margins on all sides to about 1 or 2 feet wide, and my left/right indents about double that. I usually have no before/after spacing. Selection pane is about windows???

Oh boy, this one is a whopper and a half. The review tab. Use it to check spelling or look up words similar to the one you keep using over and over again to describe that one character. You can have Word read what you’ve written aloud to you, and why why why you would ever want this is beyond me. Accept or Reject your own writing. Compare your document to just anything Word can get it’s hands on at the moment. There’s also the ‘Hide Ink’ option which is dumb. It’s really dumb. Oh gee, oh giddy me! I shall hide Master William Hobblescoth Obeluenta’s Ink Well so that he may have-such-a-fuss when he next assumes to pen a letter with his quite in-style and catching Floennentine Quill! Stupid.

Now that you’ve seen all the useful tools let us explore the document-space. Begin by writing something. Just a little something. Just a taste. Just a smidgen of a scrumptious literary morsel.

You’ve done it. But have you? No, not really. What ghastly font is that? Its dog dunk, find a better one. 

Simply highlight what you’ve jotted down and go up to the fonts section in the Home tab. Click the drop down and you’ll be able to peruse the dusty typography.

There you go. Now, let’s find one that works. A font that really compliments what we’ve written. A typeface that can hold the sloshing juice of our wordplay. 

Be sure to pick a good one like this one: The Font That Says EMAAA.

Once you’ve done that the font will automatically change, and...

TA DAAAA! Your work is done! Thank you so much for accompanying me on this journey and I hope you learned one, two, three, or nothing things. Feel free to have questions and just hold on to them tightly. Stay tuned for the upcoming second installment all about alternative word processors like Bendengratz 89 and Oh Ow Oopsie The Words Are Colliding With My Head.

[dangstudios]

Game Music: A primer for the clueless, by the clueless

This is Dorian, coming at you with another DANG! dev post, and I’m here to talk about music! Music is a pretty important part of every game DANG! has made, as it kind of allows you to set up the emotional context of a scene without clumsily telling the player what they should be feeling. Our most frequent composer is our very own Ben Caulkins, but I took the reins on creating the background music for Burger this time around. So! I’m going to take you through my Bitwig project and show you how that music came to be!

First off, the DAW (digital audio workstation) I’m using is Bitwig Studio 2. I really like its interface -- I’ve found it to be super clean and easier to parse than Ableton Live or Pro Tools. One of my favorite features, though, is probably its plugin isolation, as a crashed plugin no longer means a crashed project (which is crucial when working with some less-than-stable VSTs).

This is the arrangement view, where most of our MIDI sequencing and audio recording happens. Bitwig also has an Ableton-like clip view, but I find that’s generally more suited to live performance than composition. The arrangement view has a space for each of our tracks, most of which are hooked up to different virtual synthesizers. This particular composition is entirely based on MIDI sequencing -- no recordings of live performance this time around.

Choosing the right synth for the job is probably one of the most difficult parts of starting a new project, as each of them have their own unique timbral properties. Plus, considering the abundance of presets that most virtual synths come with, you can usually get many types of sounds out of any given synth.

This time around, I started out with Bitwig’s built-in FM-4 synth, as I knew I could get the sort of soft, buzzy bass that I wanted pretty easily. I slapped an Arpeggiator on that and left all of the gates wide open to get a full sound that stands on its own in the intro and doesn’t get lost in the mix when the lead kicks in.

Then came the drum track, made up of bitwig’s built in E-Kick, E-Snare, and E-Hat drum synths. I’m not using samples here because a) I was too lazy to figure out where on my computer I actually put my drum samples and b) synthesizing your own drums gives you a bit more control over the final sound. I put a Compressor on the synth for a more punchy sound, and a Treemonster to introduce a bit of tonal modulation into the sound.

For my lead synth, I used Serenity, a free synth that has a bunch of excellent vocal waveforms and presets. I mostly left this preset untouched, as I really liked how it sounded out of the box -- I mostly just reduced some of the delay later on in the composition. Serenity also comes up again about halfway through the composition with a choir preset.

After the initial choir bridge, the stock Bit-8 plugin kicks in and provides a bitcrush effect on top of the compressor that was already working its magic beforehand. Below that track, I have a separate instance of Serenity, using the same preset but with a different delay to accommodate the change in rhythm.

And finally, at the bottom I have UFO-ZEd with another Arpeggiator acting as a rhythm track to give a little bit more substance to the mix.

And that’s the technical side of how I produced the background music for Burger! I wanted to create something frantic and a little bit cartoonish, and by using all of these different synths and sounds, I think that came across! I’m not a super experienced composer, but working on this was really fun and I hope I can provide music for more of our projects in the future.

[dangstudios]

Sound Design: The Art of Laziness

Hello and welcome to another dastardly DANG! post, this time featuring the grand debut of a new author: me. I’m Fuller, the second programmer of DANG!. I was beamed into existence the 38th time someone said Tetsuo’s name in Akira, and now I spend endless hours messing with the pitch of the sound effects in our games. In fact, that’s what I’ll be talking about today: how to use variance to spice up the sounds of your game.

People love to look down on mobile games and I am no exception, but there’s a lot we can learn from their success. Popular mobile games are actually packed with sound effects and rich in visual polish that play a major role in their success. They turn something as mundane as matching three purple shapes into an app that gets downloaded 2.7 billion times. It’s a big reason why Candy Crush is so popular while Bejeweled is largely forgotten. Although it doesn’t help that every copy of Bejeweled was deleted when the computers had to be rewritten for the 21st century.

Anyway, enough about whatever that last paragraph was about. Onto this one. I want to talk specifically about repetitive sounds in games: the ones that your players will be hearing hundreds of times in their playthroughs. These will be tied to a core loop of your game, so it’s even more important they don’t turn players off. Whether it’s footsteps as the player walks around, the pop that plays while swapping pieces of candy, or the sound of a chute dispensing cooking ingredients, hearing the same sound over and over with no variance will rapidly make the experience uninteresting. Whatever sound effects you have, if they’re going to repeat, they have to change.

The easiest, quickest, and laziest (all the qualities we look for as game designers) way to accomplish this is to randomize the pitch. Changing the pitch of your sound too much will distort it beyond recognition, so the randomization I’m talking about is actually pretty minimal. Let’s say your pitch plays at a 1 normally. The random range I usually go with is 0.8 to 1.2 or less. Below is a little code snippet (Unity C#) that does this.

Be sure to listen to the sound effect at the minimum pitch and the maximum pitch to make sure it sounds ok at both ends of the range. I usually apply the same range effect to the volume, because it’s just as easy to do and helps achieve the same effect. This is actually the basic code I used for every sound effect (although some required a more complicated version) in our Patreon game of the month, Bürger.

This basic effect is enough to spice up every last one your sound effects if you’re a mere simpleton, like me. But sometimes a true sage, like me, comes along and wants a little more. I’m only going to cover two ways I did this in Bürger so this is by no means an exhaustive.

In Bürger there is a dispenser for each different type of ingredient, and originally I added this same pitch randomization to all of them. But when playing, you’re quickly and frequently dispensing multiples of different ingredients, and even the randomization failed to remedy the repetition.

As you can see above, the dispensers are already lined up like an experimental instrument, so why not go all the way and make it one? The answer is because that would take way more time than I actually wanted to spend on this (remember: laziness), but I gave it a nudge in that direction. As you’ll find out by playing the game itself or by reading the rest of this sentence, I made each dispenser have it’s own pitch, ascending from left to right. This creates the semblance of an instrument, but still goes a long way in reducing the wear of the crunching sound of these dispensers, and all for three easy payments of $19.99.

The second sound I felt was important to sink my time into was the sizzle of patties on the grill. Like dispensing ingredients, this is also part of the core loop of the game. The sizzle also presented its own challenges, and if it was as lazilly implemented as the rest of the sounds, it would be quite jarring. The first difficulty is that just about everyone knows what it sounds like to grill a patty, so I couldn’t just make up a sound effect for it like with the dispensers. Another is that the sound clip should last for however long it takes the burger to cook. And lastly there’s nothing to prevent the player from sizzling multiple patties at the same time, in fact it’s encouraged. This means the sound effect also has to sound reasonable in multiples.

Again, the two best ways to approach this are by manipulating the pitch and volume. However, merely picking a random pitch and volume would neither work for the whole thirty seconds it takes to cook nor sound good in multiples, as it quickly becomes a sizzle cacophony. My solution was as patties continue to cook, have them get quieter and sizzle at a lower frequency, which not only mimics the sound of real grilling patties but also helps combat the issue of multiple sounds playing at once (because of the lower volumes).

Even though this post is an absolute masterpiece (you’re welcome), it’s starting to drag on, so I’d like to impart one final tip before logging off the whole internet until it’s my turn to post again: it’s rare that you want to immediately stop your continuous sound effects rather than slowly making them quieter. And my example for this is my slick patty sound technology. Originally, when the player picked up the patty off the grill, the sizzle would abruptly cut off. But that’s not how real oily grills work. In fact, most of the time the loudest parts of the sizzling sound comes from the small bits that fell off main meat slab. So instead I interpolated the sizzle volume to 0 when the patty is lifted off the stove, which added a satisfying amount of depth to the whole sizzle atmosphere.

If you start paying a little closer attention to the sound effects you’re hearing while playing games, you’ll encounter this type of stuff more often than you’d think. For myself, I hope to continue designing sizzlin’ sound effects like you’ll find in Bürger. Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to meeting the last member of our team in their post next week!

[dangstudios]

Lists are my life

Hey everyone! I’m Janice. I graduated with these 5 other weirdos and now and I make DANG! art and games for a…living. Well, we’re trying to get there anyway. It’s been almost 2 months since we’ve officially got off our college asses and sat right back down on our self-employed asses and the transition has been a ride. I guess I’m going to take a little time now to give some tips on how to make this transition, rebirth, or change of lifestyle a little bit easier.

1. ORGANIZE YOURSELF

LISTS

There can be so many things going on at once in your life and its important to not let that sneak up and come crashing down on you. One way to do that is to keep track of everything, so make hella LISTS. Think of something that will ultimately need your attention? Even if it’s in two months? Write. it. down. Keep to-do lists and keep them updated at all times. Not only will it help you remember tasks, it can also be therapeutic to know you have things under control, especially when you can make that sweet, sweet cross-off. It’s also helpful to make multiple, for instance I personally like to make “To Do NOW” and “To Do GENERAL” lists. It helps me stay focused on more pressing tasks while also having other errands still present on the back burner. In addition to to-do lists, I also have lists of inspirations, tutorials, up-coming concerts, and more. I think staying organized is empowering, and although it may seem tedious, it helps you down the line.

CLEANING

Yea… it’s important. I really believe that being in a clean and organized space can be motivating and help reduce anxiety. Again it’s that feeling of, “Damn, I got my shit together.” and even if that isn’t true, feigning it is one step closer. Being put together in one aspect of your life can ultimately help out the others. I know it can sometimes seem like a waste of time, like why should I make my bed if I’m just going to sleep on it again tonight? or this may be the 6th time I’m wearing this shirt but it’s got no stains so why not? (Bury me in clean laundry, it’s literally the best thing on earth come on) but really staying fresh and maintaining a clean space does so much good both mentally and physically. I was on an overnight trip once with a friend who woke up early just to clean the rented kitchen by herself and when I asked her why she felt impelled to do that she replied, “It feels good to know I have the ability to control something in my life.” You’ll feel better in so many ways so do please make time for it.

2. YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE

EATING RIGHT

Plan. Plan. Plan. Make time to buy groceries and to make meals, decide what you want before you make that trip to the supermarket. Make another list! Feeling good in your body is seriously influenced by what you put into it so, try to eat healthier and more regularly. Read up on some recipes so you get excited to make your own food! Honestly, I’m so in love with food that planning on what I’m going to eat motivates me to get my work done faster so this helped me a lot. I’ve also been learning to make healthier food so that I can ultimately eat… more of it. So in a lot of ways it’s a win. Just try to get into better habits so that your body doesn’t hate you.

EXERCISE

“Just try to get into better habits so that your body doesn’t hate you”

I found that sleeping earlier and waking up earlier to exercise in the morning has improved my life a ton. Yes, it’s hard to get out of bed a lot of the time but once you start moving (in my case, biking or skateboarding) the lethargy gets all shaken off. That burst of energy really jumpstarts your day and keeps the momentum of productivity going, evidently more-so than getting more sleep. I not only feel more energized, but also I feel better about myself, more accomplished in a way. Also, being awake before everyone else and seeing the sunrise is pretty cool.

TAKE BREAKS

As someone who works at a desk all day I can attest to how uncomfortable my body can feel at times because of it. My neck and shoulders hurt constantly, my arms and hands get so sore, and my eyes are basically always overstrained even when I’m not looking at a screen at this point. So what I try to do and what you should definitely do is, get up! At least every hour or so, get up and walk around. Maybe do a little chore here and there every time you do. Look away from the screen every so often! Green is apparently the best color for your eyes to rest on so, look out the window! If you’re fortunate to have green outside your window that is, and if not, then take a walk! Go throw out that trash that’s been overflowing for way too long! Give yourself reasons to take breaks, and even kill two birds with one stone in this process of self-care.

3. KEEP A ROUTINE

This kind of goes with organization, planning, treating your body nicely… I guess this kind of wraps all the previous points together. Maintaining a routine can be healthy, healthy in that you get used to good habits and not losing yourself in uncertainty. It helps you keep on top of things and weeds out distractions, as it provides you a reference of scheduled tasks and activities. For me this involves, exercising, checking my emails every morning, looking over my to-do lists, and etc. I do certain things every single day, maybe more than a few times, and although it may seem excessive to some, it helps me maintain my sanity. In some ways it’s good to have predetermined responsibilities however of course it is also super important to have other things to look forward to. Plan fun events in the future! Farmers market this Saturday? Sure, jot it down! Now it feels like your routine has an ultimate purpose. For instance, I have a concert coming up in two weeks and it gives reason to my everyday duties, making them easier to get through.

It’s easy to overwork, get demotivated, and just end up having a hazy and uneasy mind. As an incredibly anxious person, I know how real that problem can be. But I can honestly say that actively trying to change my lifestyle and following these tips as best as I can these days has helped immensely with how I feel about myself and ultimately how I feel about the future. Beginning a new stage in life can be terrifying, I know, but treat yourself better and you may just start to feel better too.

[dangstudios]

Learning to be the Boss Boy

Hey all. I’m Ben and I play with LEGO and make video games. On paper I’m technically the CEO of DANG!, but don’t let that fool you because I have no idea what I’m doing. Okay, maybe I can do a few things, but “being organized” and “doing business” are ones I’m still trying to get a hold of. In fact, that’s kind of what I want to talk about in this post.

The problem I’m having has to do with prioritization, delegation, and communication. In short, I’m not great at any of it, and when you’re trying to organize a group of people to all be on the same page and stay task-oriented, it can impact the team’s efficiency. If all you do is say what needs to be done rather than who needs to do it, then the team members walk away not knowing what their particular job is and nothing gets done. What’s more is that when you do assign individual tasks, you need to think carefully about how critical those tasks are: do we really need this super-detailed character model right now, or can it wait? This is so you make sure that time is being spent efficiently on the most fundamental components of your goal before working on the more detailed aspects

For example, say we need to design a level for our game (which we do). So, I might have a few design meetings with a couple of team members, bang out a first-pass on a design, write up a GDD and call a meeting to announce our brilliant new level’s design. Right away, it should be known what has to be made first, by whom and how long that should take. Then, once that’s done, you’ve got the next round of assignments ready to give out. This is the ideal scenario where you’ve actually thought a schedule through and know what needs to happen.

As a team, I’d say we’re still working on the part that comes after the design. When it comes time to delegate and start working on something that’s real, things move a little more slowly. For instance, we had a level’s design worked out on paper but failed to assign the task of grayboxing to any one individual, leaving it in limbo until Sam, my co-lead on our current project, stepped up to do it. Now, if we had clearly communicated to the team who should do the grayboxing and what doing the grayboxing entails, then it might have been done the day we had our level’s design by someone other than Sam so he could’ve focused on the programming. But instead, we left it unsaid and just assumed it would get done eventually, which it did, just well after it should have been.

I think part of the reason this is happening is because, back in school, I and Sam got comfortable working on stuff as just a two-person team. The demo we have for IO Interloper was originally a school project that he and I did together in a couple of weeks, and the development process went pretty smoothly. I think this is because we both know what the other is skilled at, so once we had a design down we were comfortable leaving each other to our own work: Sam on the programming and UI, and myself on the art and music. And when something that needed to get done was overlooked, it was just done by whoever’s skill-set it fell into. We got so used to doing everything ourselves that we never got comfortable entrusting tasks to others.

The issue we have now is that we have a team of six people with overlapping skills, so rather than deciding who gets to work on which specific task, we sort of throw the task out there and hope that someone picks it up. The issue is when everyone is too afraid to step on each other’s toes and so no one claims the task, leaving it floating in limbo. This is by no means the fault of the team for failing to take initiative, but rather it’s my own and Sam’s faults as leads for failing to effectively delegate.

For the level we’re currently working on, a lot of the design was conceived of by myself, so it was my responsibility to make sure everyone on the team understood what happens in the level, what needs to be made for it and who should make it. That didn’t really happen, and then I left the country for a two-week vacation, leaving behind a document loosely outlining the level’s design. The whole time I was gone I had knots in my stomach because I knew I’d failed to make a timeline and a plan for who would work on which aspects of the level, and even though a little progress was made while I was gone, it wasn’t as much as could have been.

Now this isn’t to say that absolutely nothing gets done at DANG!. Despite it all, we actually get quite a bit done, and I’ve got everyone on the team to thank for that for caring about the company and for stepping up to fill in the gaps where they show up. I’m also not saying that job assignments can’t come from group discussions where we talk out who is going to do what, I just think that those discussions need to end with everyone walking away knowing exactly what they need to do.

I’m an anxious person by nature, so I’m never exactly sure if my worries come from genuine problems or my own paranoia. I often get the feeling that things aren’t as bad as my head makes them out to be, so I can’t help but wonder if all of these issues I see are real or imagined. That being said, even though it could probably be worse, I definitely think I have a lot to work on with regards to helping our team function more efficiently. My hope is that by laying out all of my worries, I’ll be more able to understand and do something about them. All that’s left to see now is if I can actually make the necessary changes in myself.

[dangstudios]

HOW TO FEEL LIKE A HACKER

Hey everyone! Sam here. I'm a programmer/technical artist/designer/whatever at DANG! (we're all wearing a lot of hats). Among many other things, I designed most of the UI/UX for IO Interloper -- so in this first blog post, I thought I'd write a little about how we're thinking about the game's interface. In a game with as much UI as this, the line between interface design and game design gets pretty blurry, so we'll talk about both!

First of all, what are our goals here? We're trying to do a lot in IO, but for most of it to work, there's one thing we have to accomplish first: you have to feel like a hacker.

That's not an easy thing to pull off! The vast majority of the time, actual real-life hacking is both extremely technical and extremely boring (I mean, I assume. if you're an actual hacker and it rules, get in touch. it's not too late for me to change careers). Our goal isn't really to simulate the actual experience of a hacker, which is probably a frustrating, exhausting slog, but to give you the experience you imagine when you think of hacking at its best & most exciting. Let's break that down a bit, because the fantasy of hacking is made up of a few different ideas:

1) it's cool to solve complicated problems When I think of cool hackers, I think of people who can outsmart any security system, weasel their way out of any trap, and bypass any obstacle. At its heart, that's a fantasy of being able to think on your feet and come up with creative solutions to problems. I'd like to make a distinction between puzzle solving and problem solving (Mark Brown has a great video on Zachtronics' take on this here). Solving a puzzle can make you feel clever, but it's a different experience than forging your own path. Immersive sims tend to be good at providing this kind of experience because they're highly systemic -- they have a lot of complicated interlocking parts that can be taken advantage of to lead to desired results. That leads me to:

2) it's cool to have (near) mastery over a complex system Not only is it fun to play in a sandboxy space with a bunch of systems, it's very fun (and particularly hackery) to know exactly what'll happen when you mess with any particular part. In practice, it turns out it's actually more exciting if you just have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. Solvable systems are interesting in their own right, but chaos and unexpected consequences are much more hackery. To summarize: In order to make cool plans and solutions to problems, you have to be able to make predictions, and in order for the game to keep you on your toes, those predictions have to be just a little bit vague. There is one thing that shouldn't be vague, though, and that's the UI.

3) it's cool to understand an interface that an observer would be baffled by The majority of hackers in TV and movies have some kind of strange UI they're masterfully operating that all the other characters are completely mystified by. That's pretty cool! It's like the hacker has learned a special language that allows them to understand things mere mortals never could. To pull this off, we have to design some bizarre, clunky UI, then carefully teach the player how it all works. It has to have enough in common with interfaces that people are used to that they don't immediately bounce off, but still has to be weird enough that they feel smart using it once they've figured it out. This is its own variety of systems mastery.

So! This is what we're trying to do with IO's interface: it has to make sense and be helpful in context, but seem like total nonsense out of context. It has to be a little bit clunky so that you'll develop muscle memory for certain actions, which lets you feel like you're doing complicated things faster than most people would be able to (which is true!). And aesthetically, it has to be very sparse and functional. As much as I love goofy backgrounds and frills, the hacker you're playing as is here to do a job. Also, it would be pretty distracting.

As an example, here's a fairly common window you'll see a lot in the game:

Without context, this should leave you with a lot of questions. You can probably infer a few things:

this window is used to control a drone

the two circles are probably joysticks you can use to move it around

there's something happening on the bottom left?

But you wouldn't know:

where this drone is

how you could even tell if you were moving it correctly

what that thing on the bottom left is???

If you'd been playing the game up to now, though, you'd understand all of those things. You'd know where the drone is because you selected it when you pulled up this window. You'd know if it's moving because you'd be able to see it through the security cameras. And you'd know that the bottom left thing means that you're plugged into a server access port because you clicked on it when you were over a server access port.

So if we expand this out to the entire screen...

...an innocent bystander would be completely overwhelmed. If you parse through this, you can likely figure out a bunch of things. But the person playing it knows exactly what's going on, because they intentionally opened all of those windows and, presumably, have some kind of plan in motion for how to use them.

Hopefully that was interesting! We'll have another blog post up next Friday. In the meantime, you can download the demo here for free!

See you in a week.

[dangstudios]

Welcome to the Infodesert

Hey everyone, I’m Perrin. I beamed violently out of infinite space-time and now I’m here to tell you about this devblog: DANG!’s devblog.

Here we’ll keep you up to date on our projects, primarily our current game-in-progress IO Interloper: an IGF nominee and E3 College Game Competition finalist. Those of you who are following DANG!’s newsletter (which, if you aren’t, you definitely should) might be wondering “How is this devblog different? Huh? How? Answer me, you animal.” Well, I’ll tell you. Calm the shit down.

Every week I’ll force a member of the DANG! team to talk about what they’ve worked on and post it here every Friday. I have no idea what they’ll do and I probably never will (as I can only read Conclobb Sanskrit and Water Text). Hopefully they’ll show what they’ve been working on in a more in-depth and personal way than the newsletter allows. Or they’ll scrawl some inane hexes on the computer screen and I’ll have to clean it off. I wish I could vet this blog properly, but my doctor says that any time I try to read my brain rewinds. In six months I’ll be no more than a man-toddler spitting all over this keyboard and wailing as Ben plays his horrible music at bedtime. In six months nothing will have changed.