Game City 8

PHEW, that's the first thought, sad sigh is the second, feeling happy is the third.

Game City was insanely fun and a good experience which I recomend for everyone. You get to meet people and hang out with them for a week playing games and talking about stuff wondering around the city of Nottingham (which actually is quite nice in my opinion).


I had three talks over there, my 'The Sounds of Badland' talk, a lecture about 'Video Game Sound Design' and then was part of the 'Nuclear Throne' panel where most of the NT team went through design concepts and other features.

   

                                     so, here I had my Badland talk...!!

          <---setting up and then people started arriving ^                  



 The Q/A in the Badland talk was insanely good, there were clearly people interested in video game sound design and had a lot of good questions and discussions, video game audio is going towards a bright future I tell you :)

There's a few things that kinda bugged me on that talk, first off I had an hour more than intended which was actually super good BUT for some reason I got stuck in showing the impact sounds, weird glitch in my brain I think :D and in the Q/A we were talking about ear fatigue and I pointed out this popular game by name (which you shouldn't really do, very unprofessional of me) which in my opinion really fatigues your ears with the sound being so squashed and I personally know the sound guy behind the game, I really wasn't trying to slag him off or anything honestly, he is a solid professional aswell and i'm sure that the sound side must have been pushed to the squashed direction.
Phew now that's out of my chest :) time to carry on!

 

<-- people arriving to the
      Nuclear Throne panel


     Rami submitting
     Nuclear Throne to IGF ->




The Video Game Sound Design lecture was a bit funny, I wrote the whole thing with either starting sound designers to already professional sound designers in mind. I think there were two sound designers present and rest were just generally interested in the topic. Well, instead of just catering to two people I winged the chat with entry level stuff with my more advanced points in mind for the two sound designers. I think the lecture went pretty well and we went slightly overtime aswell and I enjoyed it :) the idea was to get sound people engaged in a open lecture/conversation/speculation rather than me just babbling about and I think we got this going pretty well, can't wait to do this lecture with the intended audience in mind though, going to be craaaazyyyyyyy!

The Nuclear Throne panel was suuuuuuuper fun to do, pretty much it was Rami Ismail from Vlambeer asking me (sound designer), Paul Veer (visual artist) and Jukio Kallio (composer)
about our design ideas and how we see the game, we also had Jukio performing the starting song
of the game and the ending credits song, it was so so so so so so so nice, we also had a Q/A from the
audience. I think people new to the game didn't really get that much out of this panel as people who already knew the game and I think that was more in our mind aswell, to cater to people who just wanted a more deeper insight of what we're doing instead of advertising in a panel form.

OKAY talks aside i'll just type in some random stuff from Game City.

I got to meet old friends and got to bump into new friends, I met Ed Key who made PROTEUS, seriously, if you don't know the game CHECK IT OUT!

I finally met JMICKLE, the dude who makes cool beats and cool games (Coffee Mafia anyone?!)

I caught Robin Arnott doing good pranks:

I met Jesse Hurtado who's a sound designer/composer, a nice fellow, we had scone pizzas while listening to Britney Spears megamix........the shop had it on!!




Also met composer David Fenn, we were pretty much always at the same place, I think sound people are drawn towards the same places or something, or maybe...maybe it's because....you're a wizard 'arry!

I met a BUNCH of super nice developers aswell, just realized if I type everyone here this blogpost will be probably longer than the lord of the rings book set! Everyone I met were really nice and i'm glad that I met all of you!


I had a lot of good interviews aswell during GameCity :) some with some really big magazines/productions, so be sure to check your local magazine stores for Hunks monthly...errrr... videogame magazines that is!!



I was saddened that our most favourite game of all time, Frogdude, disappeared after a few days, oh the joy we had observing it go at the market square!














Oh and my hotel room...

My hotel room also saw some work, I do work a little too much from time to time...

 

I actually enjoyed my hotel room view aswell!

I miss all the people who I met and the general atmosphere, both Daniels, Brrrap, ohhh you people know yourselves, pretty much everyone who hung at the Pit & Pendulum!!

Being at Nottingham just solified my decision that i'm moving to the UK when I can.

Laters!

Eyeing you up!

Yo yo yoooo!

Okay, this quick post is about me seeing (no pun) a lot of players not understanding how Eyes special power 'mindcontrol' works in Nuclear Throne. So here's a quick video showing what this mutant can do and also showing why it's a good idea to be careful with 'mindcontrol' :)

Also if you're being creative, why not try a melee build on this character, i'm sure you'll get the hang of it fast enough ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHraA-_XTjo&feature=youtu.be


Awrite, in 28hours i'm off to the airport to go to GameCity in Nottingham, UK!!
Mega excited and phew there's so much to do! I think i've got two seminar/talks over there and a two hour lecture i'm holding about videogame sound design, so if you're over there come and check 'em out! Plenty of interviews too which is super nice! And hanging out with friends in this magical video game town!! YESSSSSS!

Oh god, I have to wake up soon and do intense amounts of work towards a videogame i'm working on before leaving... Also mixed a metal bands EP today at my workplace, something reminiscent of Slayer/Megadeth/Testament/Anthrax, that was pretty fun but I seriously am not a fan of Dynaudio speakers as my mixes tend to be super flabby with them, too much excess low middle mud :/ must repair that mix ASAP after GameCity, otherwise fine!

Tip of the day: Get used to a certain pair of headphones and learn them like no other, buy a thousand of them so if they ever go out sale you'll have plenty for backup, this is probably the only way to be 80% sure of your mixes where ever you are! REFERENCE MONITORING!

Ooooooh GameCity, can't wait!!

Stream of Consciousness

Woooo there's an interview with me up on the Stream of Consciousness podcast :)
 http://www.lividhatter.com/?p=353

Wow, I still can't believe it's Game City this week, I have soooo much to do before that and lots of playing with FMOD Designer :) I like using FMOD Designer although now my Pro Tools has been creating random silences in front of loops...which kinda makes loops pop badly, argh, have to figure out why... maybe delay compensation is affecting bounces somehows? I think I have to export regions as wavefiles instead of bouncing, hmmm.

Nuclear Throne anti-gardening!

Hi guys!

Some early access gameplay with current SFX only (no music except victory jingle), proving that Plant can be a deadly predator if used properly ;) ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQFzxx6qSDE
The video/sound quality is a bit iffy due to the free version of XSplit but yeah, it gives some indication of things :)

I'll be writing a looooong blog post about this game in the near future, explaining why things are done how they're done and a bit about the languages I wrote for the game which the mutants use to communicate!

Also I will probably start giving talks to events about Nuclear Throne when the sound design is almost ready, so if you host any events and want me to talk about Nuclear Thrones sound design please don't hesitate to contact me, I currently do talks about Badlands sound design of which the next talk is in GameCity next week, wheeeeee!!


I try to not make this blog a marketplace full of selfish adverts, I promise...
I should be sleeping, it's 2AM and I have to wake up early, argh!

ps. regarding earlier post I tried the 'trimmer inside a pan' idea, didn't work for me >:( damn!

Lazers, oh so many lazers!!

Hmmm wow, lately i've had a lot of requests to make lazer sounds for vidya games...(!?!)
Sure it's easy to make simple shooting sounds as they are not that frequent as opposed to loops and you can really use a lot of normal impact sounds to add punch and "uhnnn yeah I shot that!!" feels into them, but now I have a request for lazer loops which atleast in my opinion are pretty hard sounds to make as you don't want sounds to irritate or give headaches (in most cases that is!)...

...so what I decided to do here is kinda steer away from the basic high pitch synthesized "my ears hurt" sound to use more organic sounds, recorded my usual train trip out of the trains window and trying to manipulate that as there are some decent high end sounds and low end rumblings, lets see how this pans out hahah, oh and ofcourse there is a LOT to learn from Ben Burtt so I just might try some of his clever ideas, like putting a trimmer inside a pan and checking out how that sounds!
 
How do you guys do your lazer loops :) ? please don't hesitate to either answer me here or pop me a message on twitter @KissaKolme

Oh yeah it's GameCity in less than a week, so excited!!
I have two talks over there so feel welcome to come check em out, one talk about the sounds of Badland and one talk over video game sound design and how to improve your hearing and how to implement that into your designs and why it's important to stick to a style in a game and why to "not care what's considered standard" in design. Also if you see me there feel free to say hi and hang out :)

Hello there!

Wow, people were asking me that do I have a blog about my sound design stuff, well, now I do but I am not sure what to actually write as with work most of the stuff is secret but maybe i'll share some insights into various topics and what just comes into my mind :)

To start off for those who do not know me yet:

My name is Joonas Turner and I am a professional video game sound designer.
I am half English and half Finnish.
I live in Helsinki Finland and I work at E-Studio which is a big music studio where I was a intern in 2011 and I joined them in 2012 as a full time worker, bringing video game audio into the studio.
At the time of writing I am 26 years old and I studied film sound at Heltech AV in Helsinki Finland.
Some games I have worked with include BADLAND by Frogmind, Nuclear Throne by Vlambeer, The Swapper by Facepalm Games.
My work with video games is a bit like freelance/outsource so I get to work with various companies and individuals.
I also hold seminar talks and lectures at schools and events about video game sound design.
I'm a hobbyist video game designer and I love to attend game jams!

So yeah that's a basic intro of me I think, yay!

I am really bad at writing/grammar so I apologize that in advance as the coming blogposts are going to be completely atrocious in this respect but hopefully the content is interesting for those who like reading random sound design/audio stuff :) like I said, i'll just type stuff that comes into my mind so this is not to be taken as a scientific or a place to study absolutes, just my insights from the moment I write stuff! Cool? Lets do this!!

-Joonas

ps. it's almost 0100 am, damn!