DEVGAME: Momentum

Showing posts with label Momentum. Show all posts

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Overcoming Success

The team has basically finished Elveteka. At the moment, we're doing last minute touches before publishing to platform. While I imagine there's still a decent amount of work for the team as a whole, the bulk of my work as a composer and sound designer has been completed. Vox moved me over to Penguin Pete and Art of Sword, so this is a good time to reflect.

Completing a project is actually one of the most dangerous times for me as a creative person. For whatever reason, when I feel good about myself creatively I tend to become careless and complacent. I imagine it has something to do with my motivations around music, so I'm hoping working it out in writing helps me make sense of it.

As with all my work I detect flaws in each track I did for Elveteka, but my goal for the project was to work at 80-90% of my quality at 10x the speed. To this degree I succeeded wildly: 7 tracks in 7 weeks, plus about 20 sound effects. Right now I feel REALLY GOOD.

And now bad habits are setting in. One of the songs I composed, the Victory Music, is almost excellent, and I feel very proud of how well I managed to wrap up the themes I developed over the course of the soundtrack. (That's a blog post for another day.) You definitely get the feeling of a hero completing a journey. The problem is, now I'm listening to it all the time. I'm getting high in my own supply.

I listened to the recording of my college senior recital a lot during the summer after I graduated. It became almost part of my identity; I associated myself with the music too strongly. Criticism didn't bother me too much; I always know there's further to go. The problem was that I felt satisfied. I didn't feel the need to grow.

It would be fine to be satisfied if my career was where I wanted it to be, I suppose, but it's not. So the conundrum is, how do I feel content with the results enough to feel it was worth the effort, but not so much that I rest on my laurels.

I've been reading John Wright's blog lately and he seems like the kind of man who knows exactly what he intends to accomplish with his body of work. Perhaps it's time to touch base with my creative vision. I'm neither as talented nor as clear a thinker as Mr. Wright, but it's a helpful exercise. Simply saying "I want to be paid to write music" doesn't do justice to my deeper motivations, but I'm also leery of writing a manifesto if I don't really know what I'm talking about. Mr. Wright has has the depth of knowledge to contextualize his oeuvre in the Western Cannon. I do not. So I'll just make a list. This is a visualization exercise.

-It would be cool to go further with passing melodies around the difference voices more. I did some of that and it felt good. I'd like to do more.

-As a more contrapuntal based composer, I have a lot of respect for ambient music. I wrote one ambient track for Elveteka. It would be fun to do more.

-Earlier this year on an unrelated project I produced a mix with a lot of automated panning. The motion of the parts made the mix feel larger and more vibrant. I'd like to pick up where I left off.

-As a fairly well educated composer its easier for me to write highly directional music that builds towards a specific point. In some ways it's kind of harder for me to convincingly write music that just kind of meanders along. I suspect Penguin Pete will be a good vehicle for that challenge, being more light-hearted than heroic.

-I think it would be fun to start the sound effects earlier and develop a sense of how they contribute to the mood of the game. I did a lot of this with my first game, the electric air hockey iPad game Shock Jocks, and I'd like to continue that inquiry.

That's a good start. Those are some interesting challenges to motivate me. While we're discussing "overcoming success" I'd like to hit a second point as well.

Shortly after I finished the first track Vox informed us that the deadline was accelerated and we were in crunch time. To save time the first thing I gave up was exercise, and the last two weeks were a low energy drag as my body refused to cooperate with me. I'll say this may have been a mistake, and I need to maintain better health under pressure. I've taken this week off from composing and a lot of that had to do with reestablishing good habits.

The other thing I gave up was keeping track of my weekly list of goals, so in the course of finishing up Elveteka, I dropped the ball on some side projects (which is OK) and some basic life things (which was not.) I don't think it would kill me to consult my weekly to-do list, even if I slack a little on the weekly "reflection" I do to analyze my efforts for the week. Its fine to put your head down for a while, but you still have to take a look at the bigger picture once in a while, even if you don't think very much about it.

As far as looking at the bigger picture, I like to check out Mike Cernovich's blog and he got me interested in reading Scott Adam's "How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big." I started reading it this week. One thing that caught my attention was Adam's focus on energy. I decided to focus on energy earlier this year, so reading about it in Adams book was validating. That said, Adams is far more systematic than I am, so I'm thinking more about energy.

One thing that Adams mentioned is evaluating a course of action based in how much energy it gives you. All things being equal, the plan that energizes you is better. (Actually, its better than all things being equal.) I'll admit that when I get stumped writing music my energy completely disappears, and as soon as things are flowing, my energy soars. One of the things that helped me get through the Elveteka crunch was only writing things that I knew would work. It served me well until the 5th Level music, where I had many false starts and nearly lost all my motivation. It was only by radically simplifying my opening compositional move that I was able to gain traction. In this case, I reduced the melodic material to the bare minimum motives, and picked a sexy first sonority to ground my harmonic thinking.

So that's another thing to think about as well. Maybe I can choose compositional moves based on how energizing they are.

Well, those are my thoughts on overcoming success. What are yours? And does anyone out there have exercise tips? Here's my criteria: I only care about energy, I hate keeping track of numbers, and I prefer to do the same thing every day.

Monday, April 4, 2016

Elveteka Music: Improving Writing Speed

I need to improve my writing speed.

My old process: listen to what I've written. Analyze where music needs to go next. Theorize if proposed solution will work. Try proposed solution. If solution doesn't work, analyze why. Update theory of music. Repeat until solution found.

This is a great way to learn authentic music theory and a terrible way to meet a deadline.

My new process: Try whatever comes to mind. If it's slightly better than what you had, keep it. Never theorize. Just try and evaluate. If random tinkering works for medical research, it certainly works for music.

When learning the trumpet I was taught to be aware of my body while playing. I never heard of composers being taught to pay attention to their thought patterns while composing. I'm trying to root out bad habits:

Get off social media. Turn off the phone. Exit blogs and news sites. (Just keep email open.)

Don't listen to music over and over again. Listen once, think of something to change.

If stuck, try something at random. Anything at all. Learn by engaging, not thinking.

If I'm having a hard time evaluating a proposed change, it could be because I'm putting too much effort into playing it while also evaluating it. Enter it into the DAW and evaluate.

Don't write everything on paper. Just write what's helpful to see on paper. Put the rest into the DAW. You can can see, compared to what you will hear, what I wrote on paper was pretty minimal.

In addition to these mental habits, I employed various tricks to speed up the process:

Keep in mind counterpoint shortcuts. In my case that means all moves all valid except similar / parallel octaves and parallel 5th's.

Trust experience. For example: I realized I was writing a lot of a parallel 5th's early on into the process, but realized that since the melody is based on 5th's, that's OK. Actually that's where much of the characteristic sound comes from.

Tried all my old tricks first. I built the form around putting the melody in different registers, used pedal points, and employed tried-and-true textures like staccato strings over legato French horns.

Used template from previous project. That's about 50 instruments that I didn't have to search for. For instruments I don't use very often, this saves me a lot of time.

Stick to triadic harmony instead of counterpoint, and keep counterlines to a minimum.

Hopefully I can this template for the entire project. I may even compose all my tracks in the same project to reuse the same mix settings from one track to the next.

Certain thematic passages may be repeated in other tracks.

Simplified mixing process: grouped 28 tracks into 8 submixes, five sections. mixed start to finish. Didn't mix from scratch but began with the levels I had set while composing. It helps that I set my levels intelligently from the get-go.

Along the way I had a few happy accidents. These were solutions I would never have reached through analysis but did reach through random tinkering:

Choir parts alternating between big unisons and fully voiced chords.

The chord substitution in the 9th measure. I simply replaced Bb with B natural and it's a great sound, whatever the proper name may be for the resulting sonority.

This is the final result. I may do another mix pass before the game is released, but I'm happy to put my name to this. Two minutes of music in about two weeks. I need to double my speed, but this is a good start.

Here, enjoy some random tinkering:

Friday, March 4, 2016

When God closes a door, punch a hole in the wall.

My adventures as an artist continue.

Git wouldn’t let me push the repo onto GitLab and then pull it to my laptop, so I didn’t have anything to work on while on my breaks. Git is a git.

So I spent that time coming up with a way to make a quick and dirty Orcish.

Transliterate English words into a set of nasty-wasty Orc-sounding phonemes. E.g “dwarf” → “dvorv”

Invert the order of the phonemes. “dvorv” → “vrovd”

Clean up any awkward bits. “vrovd” → “vrov”

Arrange words according to a grammar that is an unholy hybrid of Japanese and Cornish.

Here are some sample phrases:

“I smell a dwarf!” → “Dža vrov dremz!”

“Aren’t you a little short for a Red Claw?” → “Už tov Derválk trož ma xon?”

“This is not the dwarf you’re looking for.” → “Zyd tov už küd vrov matán.”

Friends of a mystical bent have often told me that whenever God closes a door, He opens a window. Given, however, that God's first recorded command was "Make babies and take over the world!" I believe that when God closes a door, it's an invitation to make a window. That sort of attitude seems more in line with the "take over the world" directive. Was a hackish excuse for a fantasy language the best window to make? Probably not. But a window it is.

So here's the graphical thingy I did today:

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Motivation and the Artist's Ego

Hi all. I've made one or two games before, none of which were publishable, but all of which taught me a valuable lesson:

You always hit a wall.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't generalize that. I always hit a wall. Success in game dev, or anything really, is based on my ability to either surmount the wall, or else incorporate it into my schemes.

I'm tracking my work as a Devgame intern on my blog. Today, I documented some ways I surmounted the wall:

...on regaining momentum. I have found that there are three things that lead to increasing and maintaining my momentum.

The first is to brainstorm up the smallest possible task I can do and do that. Small motion begets larger motion.

The second is to show my work. I’m an artist. I’m egotistical. I welcome the incoming adulation.

After following my own excellent advice, I proceeded to write my own sprite packer. Um. It's terrible. Nobody but me should use it.

I’m not attending Devgame because I want to do art for games. I’m attending Devgame because I want to design games. If I can’t hack it, then I’d love to make a living making games in some other role anyway, but I learned the art side of things for the same reason I learned how to code: the artist’s catch 22.

It works like this: if you are a writer, cartoonist, or whatever, nobody will publish you until you’re a known quantity. And you aren’t a known quantity until you’ve been published.

When I first booted up Super Mario World on the SNES and realized that this was what I wanted to do, I assumed that game design was like all the other arts. Nobody will produce one of your designs until you’ve designed something that has been produced. And since I’m poor as a churchmouse, and can’t outright hire people to produce stuff for me, I assumed I would have to do everything myself.

Thus, I am a third-rate artist and a fourth-rate code-monkey. And please, don’t mistake that statement for humility. Third and fourth rate are still a hell of a lot better than average.

Anyhow, I'm going to be tracking my progress here as well as there. Cheers.