MindFire Academy

Well, it’s all over. Colby and I are heading home tomorrow with enough swag and crap printed on paper to fill another two pieces of luggage… but we’ve managed to make it all fit. Colby spent more time on the expo floor today checking out any of the tools we might have missed and picking up as many pens as possible (they disappear in the office). I split my time between the expo and a few talks.

Up first was Damian Kastbauer’s (Freelance) talk “Footsteps: An Informal Sound Study.” This talk was only tweny-five minutes, but Damian was able to pack a lot into his presentation. He first went over a few examples of classic footsteps in games such as Dig Dug, Double Dragon and other Atari and NES titles, the video then proceeded through the introduction of the Playstation through today’s high-end consoles with games like Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and the Wii Fit running simulator. During the talk Damian reminded us to remember the aural expectation of classic sounds and to remember what choices we have when implementing footsteps into our games. He also took time to remind us to blaze new paths, something we should all be doing regardless of our job’s in the media/entertainment industry!

Next up was Brian Min (DoubleFine Productions) and his talk “Auto-Tuning Chopin in Stacking Audio Design.” Now, the title may be funny, but he wasn’t really kidding. Brian had his work cut out for him when he was faced with two hours of cut scenes along with the in-game audio for DoubleFine’s new PSN/XBLA title Stacking¹. The music budget for stacking was limited so Brain proposed licensing pre-recorded classical music. When fitting the music into the game he used our typical studio tools in innovative ways to make it seem as if the pieces were written exclusively for the title. He did a great job and his talk was not only funny, but inspiring!

The final talk I attended at GDC 2011 was Francois Thibault’s (AudioKinetic) “Adding Realism to Environmental Reverberation Using Convolution: Are We There Yet?” The talk was great, although all of the mathematics behind the convolution engine used is way above my pay-grade, the real world examples of how new ways of thinking about convolution and the power of new systems is allowing audio designers to implement wonderful real sounding spaces in games were not only interesting, but invaluable!

All in all, the future of game audio is bright. I learned so much this year and I have a lot to put down on paper as I work on some brand new curriculum. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to ask here or hit us up at facebook.com/mindfireacademy.

Until next time,
The Mindfire Crew

¹Go buy this title, it is insanely awesome. That is all.