All I’ll say (and I hope someone else can appreciate this) is that it the brass section of an orchestra sounds friggin’ amazing when it’s doubled and spaced in an optimal fashion. Makes me all tingly. Just, duh-duh-duh MWAAAAAAAAH. All buzzy with the overtones a-poppin’ while they hold hands and dance in circles. One of my favorite sounds.

There are some days things just plain refuse to work, and fault never lies with just one person or circumstance. The software is crashing, the MIDI routing hiccups, the instrument doesn’t perform as expected, or there’s an unannounced support task that inhibits or destroys my momentum. Or sometimes it’s even an outside issue (or frequently, issues) that affects my composure at work.

It’s often frustrating when I’m trying to accomplish something, and I know, I just know, that I’m fully capable of delivering the goal I have in mind, but one roadblock after another comes up and inhibits my progress. Sometimes it’s my own fear of failure (or success!) that holds me back. It’s very easy to get discouraged and feel like the end goal is an impossible task and not worth pushing to, especially when dealing with an art as emotional as music. It’s frequently a lonely experience, speaking, reading, and writing in a language that most can only topically understand, and no matter how much I try to disconnect myself from the work, I’ve never been able to reduce that emotional bond to my work. It is singularly my greatest strength and my most significant weakness.

Despite the challenges though, days always follow where I burst through the walls and revel in my success, sometimes bloody and tattered, but it makes it all worth it. It’s is sad and comical relationship, because so frequently, it’s often right before a major breakthrough that I begin to seriously ask myself if it’s at all worth it and if I really have what it takes to keep going. The call of a simpler and less intense life sometimes beckons, and it’s hard not to indulge in the idea of just running away from the challenge of living through the stress of growing and changing as a musician and person. And there, right there, is why I’m always so amazed at how clearly it speaks, that artistic expression is not simply a cute little distraction or just a part of life, it is life, in a wholly encompassing and un-analogous way.

I’ve been asked by many people what it takes to succeed in art, music, and games professionally. Admittedly, I was not making a very smart or sensible choice by choosing to study music in college. There isn’t exactly an industry or group out there that is just itching to hire young, bright musicians straight out of college. I’ve frequently joked that I was essentially getting a fast food degree (What does a liberal arts grad say after graduation? “Would like fries with that?”). That’s not to say that making a name for yourself and succeeding isn’t possible, but the opportunities for artists are far and few between. Thus, when asked what the big secret is, I always answer, “Love what you do.”

It may seem like an odd answer at first, since it seems that you can only love it if you’re in a position to do so, but the point behind it is that if you don’t love your passions and interests, like video game design, writing music, painting pictures, or anything in-between, you’ll never be able to keep going when things are down. Anyone can enjoy something when it all works as planned, but you can only say that you love something if you’re able and willing to keep going when things get difficult or when you’ve been knocked flat on your rear and you’re left wondering, “Now what?” You know it’s love when a circumstance or event threatens to take something away from you, and you give yourself no choice but to fight back because it’s too precious to lose. Because you know what? You’re going to fail. You’re going to get rejection letters, you’re going to lose your work, you’re going to mess something up, and you’re going to be told by someone that it’s a waste of your time, but that’s your cue to push the adversity aside and say, “No, I’m going to keep moving forward, because it’s my decision to do so, and it’s what I want.” That’s really and truly the only difference between people that are successful and people that just coast. Sure, there’s talent and genetic dispositions, and a whole slew of other this-an’-that’s. All those things are though, are just the shoes, socks, and shorts you wear on the run. Sure, they help, but they’re not going to sustain you on the uphill climb or give you the will to go on when you think you can’t take another step. I’ve met and worked with plenty of people that had the advantage of being naturally musically gifted, or being born into a musical family, or just really pretty and attractive with a decent voice, and even others with a massively inflated ego and a disgusting sense of entitlement. Despite any advantage someone else might start with, I promise you that your love of what you do will carry you as far as you want to go, and that people that are just coasting to a destination with the assumption that their looks, birthright, or entitlement will carry them to glory are in for a very rude surprise in the end.

So march onward, fellow hobbyists, enthusiasts, and lifetime learners. The spoils are ours for the taking.

Basically this is a really long way of saying that I wrote something cool this week and I’m really, really excited about what I’m accomplishing with it.

SnakeCharmer brought something up recently on the forums that I agreed with, and I felt it would make a good blog post. He noted:

“Players are given more visual clues than audio clues, because in the past developers have conceded that a fair number of players eventually turn the music and/or all sound down and listen to their music.”

I feel that he’s right, and that’s exactly the problem.

Let’s say you’re helping design a product. The part that you’re designing tends to be the first thing that customers rip out to replace with an after-market part. You know this, and it’s been this way for years.

Now let’s think about this. What is your motivation? If you go to work every day with the assumption that no one cares about your work, that it’s replaceable, and that it will be the first thing to go, are you really going to come in every day ready to blow people away? Are you going to be motivated to do any kind of noteworthy work if you assume people will just toss it away anyway?

No, of course not. You’ll come in, drag your feet, and put only a minimal amount of work into it because hey, people don’t want this anyway. They might not even notice if we took it away in the first place.

So then your customers will treat your work exactly as you expect them too. You’ll meet their already very low expectations. They’ll see how lackluster and boring your part is, they’ll strip it out, and they’ll put something else in to replace it. It’s a never-ending cycle. You don’t create good work because they won’t appreciate it, and they won’t appreciate it because you don’t create good work.

Well I think that’s crap.

The solution, I believe, is to create something new, better, and fantastic. Don’t wait for them to become interested. Give them a reason to be. Look at the problems, be creative to come up with unique solutions, and re-define the purpose of this particular part. Maybe, just maybe, it’s disposable because it was created to be disposable. Maybe the fact that so many people find it disposable is because it’s been designed wrong from the start, and maybe if we really take the time to sit down and ponder why this part is here, maybe then it can be redesigned to be useful, elegant, and appreciated. It might even be totally unrecognizable when it’s all finished and done, but it will be a step in a new direction that we haven’t gone before, and since we know the old way isn’t working, we can feel pretty confident in labeling this as “progress”.

And that’s a lot of maybes. So maybe I’m wrong. But judging from the enthusiastic reactions I’ve gotten so far, I’d say I’m right.

And I’d say you all have something very special to look forward to.

I know what you’re thinking — what a title, eh? What follows may sound made up, but I swear to you that every word of it is true.

Before I moved out to Phoenix, Arizona, where I now live, sleep and breathe Stargate Worlds, I lived in rainy St. Louis with my parents, two dogs, a hamster and the occasional fish that could manage to stay alive. He was something of an urban legend in my house. A thief. A thief of underwears. I kid you not.

I’m sure my family is like most other families. We buy underwear as we need them. Well, in my house we needed them quite often, because when washing day came my underwears would leave the hamper to be cleaned … and not all would make it back from the battlefield.

My mother, God bless her, was routinely doing laundry every four or five days in my house. She would call me out of my bedroom and I would see my stack of clean essentials on the table in the living room. “What the heck,” I would say upon picking them up. “What,” my mom would ask. “There are four pair here. You haven’t washed in six days … I’m missing two pair!” And it was so. Someone, or some thing, had absconded with several sets of these necessary undergarments. It wouldn’t happen often, but it would happen enough that I would see diminished height in my stack over the course of a few months.

Well, since those days I have moved out to sunny Arizona, where I have the privilege of washing my own underwear. I recently took these clothes of mine home with me for the holidays, where my mother would get reacquainted with them for the next two weeks. As I’m packing my bags on New Years Eve, I turn to my mother. “What the heck,” I said. “What,” my mom said. “There are six pair here. I came to St. Louis with TWELVE! He’s back!” “Maybe you didn’t bring as many as you thought,” said my mom. And I considered that point. So I put the matter aside until I could come home and investigate my drawers for myself. And sure enough, I had taken 12 with me to St. Louis.

I don’t know who you are or what your problem is, but I know where you stalk. And when next I’m home, you and I are going to have a prisoner exchange.

I’ve been having a lot of fun constructing our music system these past few weeks. Paying the price of entry was easy enough: 1. Create a trigger region. 2. Asign music to it. 3. Profit!

Of course I want to go further than that, so I’ve been creating this neat little network of music nodes that kind of functions like a communication network, with different music regions chattering back and forth asking each other, “Is the player over there? No, he’s here, and he’s been standing here for a while. Should I keep playing? Actually, you finish up and then I’ll go. Hang on…” It’s especially fun since I have everything commenting to a log in plain English so I can watch the musical conversation in literal terms. Then I examine their conversation. Is one region talking to much? Is everyone participating equally in the conversation? Anyone speaking out of turn? It makes the debugging process easier, but more importantly it give me more artistic insight into how things are working and balancing by funnelling technical data into a more readable format.

I don’t know what I’d do without Kismet to build all this on. Make some poor engineer miserable, probably, with my requests. And it wouldn’t work right then. But it’s great just moving the wires around, spitting out messages and designing these custom nodes and effectively building electronic pieces and plugging them all together to make it all dance. It’s great.

Wow, what an amazing time to be working at a game company. If you haven’t followed my blog posts then you’ll know I’m not a “game industry” veteran. I came here to follow a dream and take a chance on something I really wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to in the game industry and it had always seemed like it was never going to happen, my career paths just went another way. So to be here (for almost 2 years now!) and helping and watching the teams grow is incredible. That said, the hardest part about working here is what I *can’t* say.

To be fair, we don’t have any draconian rules about what employees can and can’t say publicly about what we’re building. Cheyenne employs the “common sense” mentality. Basically, if you think you shouldn’t say it, or you wonder if you should, or you need to check with someone first, you’re probably better of not saying it. So with the release of the game trailer and the corresponding increase in attention we’re getting, it gets harder and harder to practice common sense. Rest assured, we read all of the feedback, all over the net. From Gamespot #1 rankings, to comic strips, to the avid forum discussion on the validity of powered armor, halo, that Canadian guys “Bear Suit”, we see it all and read it all.

There are things I’d love to share with the community at large too, it’s just not the right time yet. All will be revealed soon “tm”, or at least in time. After all the hoopla I went back over all the concept art for armor and I have to say, I really don’t think folks will be disappointed. Both the SG fans and the sci-fi fans will find a lot to like about SGW art direction. But the hardest part is not being able to share it with you guys just yet.

Which brings up a good point, why can’t we? Simple, most of it is not entirely approved yet. I’m learning a lot of differences in game design and development vs. software design and development. That’s not to say they are mutually exclusive, just the approval process for design and implementation is different in a lot of ways. Especially when it comes to Art. Art is subjective, there’s a ton of opinions on what looks good, what doesn’t and the types of changes that get made range from completely scrapping an entire look to making subtle changes to coloration and details. And it takes a lot of time, and it can change unbelievably quickly.

I watch in amazement as we do our weekly art reviews. All kinds of things get reviewed, from concept sketches, to textures, models, animations even pixel shaders and special effects. An entire room in the office gets dedicated to the review and we easily have 30+ people in there going over it asking all kinds of questions. The presenter has to subject themselves to all kinds of feedback in return. While I can’t sit through the whole thing, and haven’t seen every piece of art, I can say that what I do see in those rooms constantly impresses me. Both in the maturity of the feedback process (being able to take constructive feedback) and the actual art talent itself. The fact that even *I*, the IT Director who’s never worked in the game industry before, get asked my opinion and actually listened to. No, that doesn’t mean my ideas make it into the game but the fact that as a team we’re asked to provide feedback and we care about that feedback is a really great feeling.

So the trailer is out, my team has had to worry about website load for possibly the first time. I must say, the load on the site has increased five fold since the airing of the commercial and that’s a good thing for us. Making people aware of the project, bring people to the site and most importantly, openly discussing opinions of what we’re doing. Trust me, the team appreciates the feedback, positive as well as negative! Community is important to us and if you’re not getting all the information you want *now* its because we want to make sure its information that counts. You’re going to see a lot of things from us during this year. So if there was a year to be a fan of the game and wanting to know more, this is the year!

I’m a gamer. No no, I think you think that you know what I think “gamer” means but what you think is not necessarily what I think of and may not be the commonly thought view of “gamer”. Follow that? Good. You see, I’m objective. I play a lot of games. I mean a lot of games. I wouldn’t be here at Cheyenne if I didn’t. But unlike so many Internet based vitriolic opinions made with 2 seconds of thought, I tend to see the good in every game I play, along with the bad.

I’m someone who can look at the Star Wars Galaxies NGE and see “why” it was done, understand it, even appreciate the end result even with all of its faults. Wait! Calm down folks, that does not mean I’d “recommend” the game to friends to play, but its to say I have played it (I have two max level toons, and no, the first was not a Jedi), studied it, see what’s good about it and even dare I say it, enjoyed my time with it. But I understand why it’s not a wildly successful product too. However, I can engage in conversation about it open minded.

Name an MMO (at least stateside) and I’ve probably tried it, played it, enjoyed it and left it for various reasons. Ultimate Online, Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Earth and Beyond, Asherons Call I and II, Eve Online, Neocron, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Fury, Auto Assault, Jumpgate, Flyff, Hero, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard, Matrix Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Shattered Galaxies, Shadowbane, the list goes on and on. Some Triple A, some obscure. One thing you’ll never hear me say in conversation is “Pfft, that game sucked.” They *all* have something to offer, large or small, there are people playing them who like them and most have little nuggets of great ideas to carry forth into the next round of great MMO’s, of which I’m hoping Stargate Worlds is one.

It never ceases to amaze me though how adamant people can be about a product. Especially if they hate it. Actually, here’s a factoid, engage anyone in conversations about MMO’s and try and keep track of how many times the exclaim something is “horrible” about it vs what was great about it. The “horrible” list is always bigger. “That was stupid” “that mechanic sucked”. It’s like one of our dirty little hobbies is to recite all the things we hate about the MMO’s we played. Regardless of how long we played them or why.

It’s really pretty simple for me, I can enjoy any online social product with the right group of friends. It’s an adventure into a virtual world where the rules are defined. You know what it takes to win and lose and you’re testing your mettle against the environment created for you. Sure, you may not like it at times, you may even scream and yell in frustration. But the question is whether or not the journey was worth it, whether you played for a day, a week, a month or years (guilty!). Regardless, if I played with friends, made friends and made some memories for me it was worth it. Learn a lot about unique gameplay ideas, what works and what doesn’t. The key is not for me, what makes it work for others. Why even games that some people laud as stinkers (adamantly at that) still have 50,000+ subscribers and make money? Why some games that people say are awesome only have 20,000 subscribers?

For me that’s where the passion is. And that’s why I came to Cheyenne Mountain. Now I’m on the inside, looking out and I find it’s even more important than ever to remain objective.

I updated my music composition pipeline recently. For years I’ve been struggling with the very basic problem of memory limitations, and in the last year specifically, the problem of 32-bit OSes not being able to muster more than 1.2 practical gigs of memory per stack (yes I’m aware of the actual math works, I’m talking about practical, real-world application with MIDI samplers). I’ve tried to get around this in several creative ways, and every time I’ve put the samplers “Some Place Else”, I’ve also needed to adjust how the music gets out of the manuscript editor and into the sequencer, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of desire. I’ve been limping along with this external model that had me using the sequencer as a VSTi rack until I got the tracks exported, but that still didn’t solve my memory problems, and it made setup an even more arduous process.

So I found this little app that makes things so much easier. It’s small, it can run multiple times (to get around the memory limitation), it saves and loads and works the way I need it to, and it’s very visual. In short, I love it. It’s reduced setup time from 30 to 60 minutes down to 5 minutes, and it negotiates the gap between my manuscript editor and my sequencer in a way that makes things easier, not more complicated.

I’ve forgotten what a joy it is to just plain write when technology doesn’t get in the way. It’s been a while since I’ve written because I’ve been so busy with other tasks. I felt warmed by the sound of the cello, like the voice of an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. I love music and technology when they work together, and this is one of those times. Cheers.

So yesterday my wife and I bought a weed-wacker/edging tool and some weed killer. And you know what? I am really excited to go home tonight and use the thing. I tried it for a little bit yesterday and was so very very pleased at how it transformed the lawn edge from “Hillbillies live here,” to “People that care about the appearence of their dwelling live here.” The Bermudagrass and bushes (read: weeds, weeds, weeds) have grown completely out of control, so I’m thrilled that I’ll be able to get it back to looking presentable again. Kinda like how it looked before we moved in.

Watch out weeds. I’m coming for you.

Ok, I have been getting flak for this for several years now, so it’s time to set the record straight.

The name is “Hapy”. Pronounced happy.

Why only the 1 “P”? Well, to make a long story just as long, here’s the gist:

Back in the early days of my internet useage, I connected to the internet via AOL (we’re talking 1993 here people!) on my Mothers account. My chosen screen name at the time was a name I had used for a character in a pencil and paper RPG called Underground. The setting of the game was basically Cyberpunk meets Insane Super-Heroes with guns (big guns). My character was originally based loosely off of the Marvel character Madcap. My character had the ability to affect other peoples emotions. Well, to be honest, just one emotion really. Heck, it may not even be an emotion. Basically my character could make people laugh. And laugh. And laugh. Did I mention these characters were Insane Super-Heroes? Yah, so he could make you laugh, and not be able to stop. Eventually you would asphyxiate and die from, literally, laughing to hard (you might break a rib or two on the way out also). My characters name? Mr. Happy Kill.

So, there I was on AOL with my cool little screen name on my Mom’s account (and no, we didn’t have a basement). Mr.HappyKill. Then I moved out (/gasp) and started using AOL on my roomates account. Problem with AOL is (or at least was; I haven’t used it in years) that I couldn’t transfer my screen name from my Mom’s account to my roomates. So, I had to make a new screen name because Mr.HappyKill was already taken by another user (me!). So, it became Mr.HappyKil. Then I moved out and got my own account, and guess what? Yah, same problem. So I became Mr.HapyKil.

I began playing Counter-Strike and used the name I had been using for so long: Mr.HapyKil, which eventually turned into MrHapykil (I even ran a server for a while known as HapyLand). After many hours of CS, then BF1942, Desert Combat, America’s Army, BF2, etc… I shortened it to just Hapy.

And I have been hapy with it ever since.