i made a music video

while looking for screenshots for my tumblr, i stumbled upon a whole world of tech demos made over the years for the zx spectrum (many of them russian). the deer running through the meadow bit at the beginning of the final video fit so well with the beginning of this song that it inspired me to do a whole video. i eagerly grabbed a bunch of them off youtube and started piecing them together into some kind of weird pseudo-narrative. i didn't have to do that much editing, as it turns out, because the ones i found were all pretty brilliant in their own ways. if nothing else, i hope this video will be a testament to that (and a testament to Blues Control, a very underrated group).

here is the link to a playlist with all demos i used in the video.

(i'm also uploading a couple more chemical warfare videos as we speak, for anyone keeping track)

chemical warfare: a wolfenstein mod i did when i was 14

after finding out that the embedded youtube videos i was using for my adventures in level design articles here are gone, i thought i should do something to make up for it.

i came up with the idea of looking back at a wolf 3d mod i did over 10 years ago called "chemical warfare". it was my first and only real significant contribution to the small wolfenstein community before i started getting into doing remixes of game music. chemical warfare is supposed to be loosely based off of wolf3d episode 4, which i have written a bit about my fascination with in this blog. and indeed, there are levels which are basically "remixes" of wolf3D levels, in episode four and elsewhere, except bigger and better..er in the eyes of a 14 year old. the level in the above video has parts which are a fairly obvious remake of episode 4, level 2 for example. but it's also a mishmash of every other thing i liked or new idea i could come up with at the time, mixed with any new graphic i could take or any new source code change i could make without changing the feel of the game that much. the result is kind of jumble of a bunch of different ideas: some really slapdash or incomplete, some too complex, some boring, some over-the-top cartoony, some too cruel, and some surprisingly interesting.

i stuck with wolf3d editing partly as a way to understand and re-experience the emotions i felt from playing the original game (i talk about this in video part 22), and partly because it was easy to visualize - every bit of data in the level was on a single screen, represented by different colors or symbols making up a big 64x64 grid. by comparison, doom and other games that i was into were full of all kinds of incomprehensible (to me) technical details. i was too overwhelmed by all the things i had to tweak just to get something working, and too bad at visualizing what everything would finally look like in the game. with wolf3d i could exorcise the ideas for spaces i felt must get out without losing my mind in the process.

i'm about halfway through the playthrough now (with commentary). i can't attest to how interesting any of this will be to someone who's not me. but i'm at level 20 now, basically halfway through the mod (there are 42 levels). my abilities and enthusiasm increased exponentially the further i got into making this, so the best levels are mostly still to come. here's a playlist of my progress that i'm updating every other day or so:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdRlER1F5rFAAaW3Q5XSZVAwCf9kcXmr&feature=view_all

i don't think this mod was a work of genius, or anything like that. there are many, many things wrong with it. but i'm someone who is very prone to relentless self-doubt and self-examination, and i didn't really have any friends in real life to share this with or talk about any design ideas with. i was (and still am to some extent) ashamed to reveal to other people that it was even an interest of mine. it was very personal to me, and hard to talk about at time. these things i did when i was much younger are still haunting me to some extent, and making it hard for me to move on into adulthood.

i'm hoping doing these videos will at least be some sort of snapshot of something that was a big part of my life for a little while, especially for someone who won't feel like playing through all 42 levels of a 10+ year old wolfenstein fan mod. i hope at least a few people can take something meaningful from it. if not, then at least doing it will make moving on a little bit easier for me.

askhole, volume 1

it's been a whole three fucking months since i've posted anything in this blog! i apologize. i have no good excuse for not updating more frequently, other than being stuck in my own head and endlessly second guessing myself

about a week ago i started a tumblr for strange videogame screenshots. just today i decided to add one of those "ask me anything" things to it to see what sort of questions i'd get. i only have three so far, but in an effort to get myself to actually post things, here they are:


One of the qualities of your music that I try to emulate is a feeling that the music is part of something much larger. Not that it feels incomplete, but that the track is just one element in a larger universe. Is this intentional? Or did you read that and think, "what is he talking about?" -Ben Prunty

i guess i have a belief that music, like all art, is there to capture a particular feeling, thought, or idea that already exists somewhere in the universe. whether or not i've done this intentionally, i think i have always approached it this way.

it is impossible, though, to get around the fact that the music i've made at each point of my life has been very reflective of the emotional place i was in at the time.

in high school (the OCR music i did) it was a kind of happiness that i had some sort of musical tools to express myself in and a naive faith that things were going to be great as soon as i got out of ohio and into the world

in college (the unidentified flavors stuff i did) it was much more shattered and incomplete because of how alienated i felt from the people around me.

from then on (basically just the Dys4ia soundtrack so far) it's been very overwhelmed but still trying to find a place of peace and happiness to operate within in the world.

i had a more involved answer but i think this best explains everything.

good job on the FTL soundtrack, btw!

(edit): i might as well include the additional stuff i cut out of the original answer
   |
   V

when i was starting out i think i was mostly motivated by having some sort of textural balance - not too many smooth or sharp sounds, etc. sometimes i'd just make pick random sounds i liked and tried to relentlessly hammer them into the mold somehow.

i was also terrified of the idea of repetition, because i was sequencing everything out by mouse alone. if i just repeated some part that was mathematically exactly the same (no volume variation or anything) as a previous part then i'd just be making a machine, and not something that was human. i won't say this is the best way or even a good way to approach it, because it's really came from a fear of the process that had nothing to do with the end result. mostly what it did was make the process of music-making a much more laborious, and less fun/give-and-take-style exercise.

despite the setbacks to the old approach, i always felt like if i were making something, i'd have to at least be a friend to the sounds i'm using and do justice to them. i wanted to let them have their day, like they're little creatures. i wanted to (and still do want to) have some sort of faith in them. in some ways it was admirable, but in other ways it was very naive.

now my approach is somewhat different. i try to find sounds that are interesting and work with the sorts of timbres and weirdnesses they have, instead of trying to relentlessly shape them into something. with the Dys4ia soundtrack i left all the background chatter very exposed because i wanted it to have that dry, uncomfortable, unsexy feeling that untreated audio recordings do (since it's a game about feeling uncomfortable with oneself). i do still think about the music i do as having some sort of narrative, though not always in a linear way. with BGM, the music invariably has to repeat, so you can't put the same sort of linear narrative arc there. instead it's more like a musical snapshot of a particular sort of feeling, which is what i tried to do with the Dys4ia music.


pizzapuke asked you: 
thanks for including skyroads on your blog, it was one of my favorite games as a kid (i've paraphrased this cause i lost the exact message)

no problem! i'm sort of surprised i never played it, given that i grew up with DOS games


animatedscreenshots asked you:
Not a question but the source link for Metamoqester contains the phrase "In a hilarious reversal of normal events, the baby rapes you!" :\

that's what i get for trying to link to things other than wikipedia =/

Indie Game: The Movie: The Review

hey! i recently wrote a review of Indie Game: The Movie. you can check it out over on Midnight Resistance

re: The Depth Jam and its criticisms

there are a few things that bother me about The Depth Jam. the biggest thing is the name, which makes it sound like some grandiose exclusive event, rather than a small-scale experiment. the fact that the participants rented a beach house, ate catered food, and appear to have a photo album with an absurd number of pictures of themselves engaged in the event don’t help that image of self-importance, but it also doesn’t say a lot about the aims of the Jam itself.

in his writeup of it, Jon Blow outlines that the idea behind the jam was to provide a space for a few experienced game developers to give each other feedback and provide the sort of meaningful input into the development of each other’s games that they might not get otherwise. it was titled “The Depth Jam” to differentiate it from other game jams, which don’t really provide a space for much meaningful artistic input. however, they do provide a more of a loose, social community space for people working on or interested in working on games. Blow concedes this point but still seems to harbor a negative opinion towards game jams in general, and the idea of a loose social interaction among people. i agree with him that most social time and energy in the tech bubble gets spent endlessly talking about the same things, and very little time is spent actually experiencing things that exist outside that bubble. but people a lot of people in technology also spend a lot of time in isolation, without many friends, so game jams can provide a welcoming space for those people.

the goal of the event is pretty noble - to allow one little instance of a space for deeper ideas to breed, but it’s difficult to say to what extent that can happen within videogame culture without some fundamental changes happening. if i were coordinating an event like this, the first thing i’d do would be to completely remove the access to technology for a few days and have the three or four participants have a required discussion of a particular book, or film, or album, or work of visual art. i would also require them to buy their own ingredients and cook food together, and would also require a hike, and maybe some sports or improvisational games, just to get their energy levels up. and then the last three or so days would be spent working on and discussing the games. this probably sounds like hippie bullcrap to some people, but the idea here is for people to go outside themselves and able to appreciate and gain meaning from the world outside their own little bubbles of technological security. that’s much more helpful and stimulating to me than catered food and lots of time spent posing for photographs... but i guess we’re just different people.

in all seriousness, in the end what i get from the depth jam article is that it’s a model that should be taken for what it is: an alternative to the traditional game jam aimed at providing some meaningful input for more experienced developers. and i do think that’s pretty noble.

it’s pretty easy to characterize the event from external appearances as an instance of a few exclusive rich white male friends who are whisked away to some private beach house to go be white saviors. i think in some ways, Jon Blow in particular has become sort of a boogeyman among people involved videogames as a representation of a pompous guy who doesn’t “get it”. to people who identify as gamers, he’s a deluded art-snob who hates all videogames. to those on the fringes, he’s the embodiment of a creepy “male gaze”-y white male. a lot of criticism leveled at his ideas from both sides seems to have a convenient target him as a person, a sort of criticism which i’ve never found particularly insightful or useful. i can’t really be critical of the fact that no non white males were invited to the jam, for example, because it’s clear that its a small-scale closed experiment done by a few friends, not an open or semi-open event with the intentions of representing a diverse array of voices within game culture.

here you could say that it still embodies what is wrong with game culture by the fact that these white males are all friends with other similarly-minded white males that they chose to participate. to which i would say, sure, but that’s a problem with social structures that exist within videogame culture, and it’s not at all unique to this event. there aren’t many non-white male voices in the videogame world, and by just throwing in a Brenda Brathwaite or a Jenova Chen you don’t really solve any problems of representation in the larger culture. and anyway, those goals being explored in that particular instance of the jam is irrelevant to the intention of the event itself, which is meant to spread and take off as its own thing, much in the way of the first indie game jam. to which you could say, they’re always relevant because they're always present in the world and i will always call these examples of privilege out for what they are. to which i would say, call out videogame culture, and call out the participants for being unaware privileged white dudes, but if you’re actually trying to criticize the jam itself you need to look at what its stated goals were, instead of just trying to characterize them into whatever negative narrative you want to fit them into. if the latter helps you feel better, fine. but that kind of approach totally shuts down the possibility for an exchange of meaningful discussion, and makes it much likelier to just create drama that devolves into name-calling. i personally find that fucking boring as hell.

(now that i’ve gotten that weight off my chest...) the other criticisms that it has an anti-community spirit don’t make sense to me, because art is a process that depends on some form of isolation from the outside world. in order to understand yourself and what you want to say, it’s important to be able to divorce yourself from the things that might have a negative or stressful influence on your own work. and just because not everyone can afford it, doesn’t mean that time away from the outside world isn’t a desirable thing.

i, personally, hope to see events like this catch on in the future, and also for the participants of this one to maybe not take themselves so seriously next time around (or at least axe the photographer).

Happy 20th Birthday, Wolf 3D!

i did a short essay for the 20th anniversary of Wolf3D over on Midnight Resistance. it's more about memory than the game itself, but i'm pretty happy with it. let me know what you think!

Wolfenstein 3D Director's Commentary

the 20th anniversary of Wolf3D is this month. to celebrate, John Carmack did a commentary of the game on youtube! i've embedded it here:

in conjunction with the commentary, they released a browser version of the game at http://wolfenstein.bethsoft.com/

sadly, only the first three episodes are available. and the graphics are a little blurry, presumably for speed reasons. but it's definitely worth checking out!

more adventures in level design articles will be coming soon!