Have a look at Frozen Synapse on the iPad…

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

Here’s a quick video showing off part of the iPad interface – hope you like!

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How to Be an Indie Game Developer

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I got an email a while back from someone who was effectively asking, “How do I become an indie game developer?”

I replied to them and did my best, but I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what they were looking for in terms of advice. We get asked similar questions quite a bit, so I thought I would write a post to which I can refer people in the future; a kind of miscellany of advice that might be useful.

Two notes: this is aimed at relative beginners who know a bit about games and will probably have a PC bias.

(more…)

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Thoughts On FLAC

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

I’m a bit of a curmudgeon (ok, a huge grumpy bastard) when it comes to the audio format FLAC.

Here are some reasons why:

Objective

- FLAC offers, at very best, an extremely marginal quality benefit over 320kbps MP3.

I’m being charitable here, as I personally don’t believe that the overwhelming majority of people (i.e. basically people who are not audio engineers on a good day) would be able to tell the difference in an ABX test. My suspicion is that some mastering engineers listening loud on high-end monitoring setups would be able to do it some of the time.

For real world situations, I believe 320kbps MP3 is sufficient.

- FLAC is more work for me!

It is just simply more work to support FLAC every time I release something. I have to encode again, listen through every track again, tag, archive and upload again. I have to create separate products in Fastspring etc. etc. Obviously this isn’t THAT difficult, but it is objectively more work.

Subjective

- I really hate tagging audio files: I actually find that process immensely tedious and slightly depressing. I know what a huge over-reaction that is, but I’m being honest about my subjective responses here. I haven’t got a system which enables me to tag an album once and then just copy all the tags over to a FLAC version – if someone knows of some software which is good for that, it would help me out.

- I didn’t think FLAC was genuinely lossless, but I was wrong about this so perhaps I should change my opinion!

- I suspect FLAC to be the preserve of what I call “golden audio cables people” i.e. people who don’t understand that the 80:20 rule applies to audio setups, display gigantic amounts of confirmation bias when it comes to various technologies and spend their time talking about weird, pendulum-wavy stuff that real audio engineers find incomprehensible. They often don’t understand that even a 1% difference in how an album is mixed would have 10,000x more impact then any of their fiddling. A lot of them listen to music on hi-fi’s rather than studio monitors, and then complain about accuracy.

This is a stereotype, of course, and grossly unfair to a lot of people. As soon as I hear FLAC, though, this part of me activates.

- The only comment I received from some fans was annoyance that I didn’t release something in FLAC.

The overwhelming majority of people who like my music seem unbelievably nice. I have received so many positive tweets, emails, comments etc. that I have really changed the way I feel about my music and gained a huge amount of creative confidence in the last few years. These comments inspired me to go on with projects like _ensnare_ and to push the boat out with a lot of the Frozen Synapse music.

So the contrast when you get “WOT NO FLAC???” or worse posted on something you’ve just released is such a huge let down that it has definitely predisposed me to hating FLAC. Even a comment like, “hey, I like this album, but I’d really appreciate a FLAC version if you had time. FLAC is good for these reasons: x,y,z” would be a VAST improvement. I know that this point is shot through with the “I wish people would be polite on the internet” fallacy, but there you go!

I’m going to continue supporting FLAC, especially now that I know it’s genuinely lossless, but I’d be really interested to see any actual evidence of scientifically conducted ABX tests.

When a difference in audio is the subject of genuine scientific uncertainty, I would be willing to bet that normal people in normal environments cannot discern it!

However I could well be wrong – let me know what you think. “I tested this myself and I could hear a difference” is not going to convince me, sadly, because I don’t know how good your test was.

Finally I want to reiterate that FLAC is clearly BETTER than 320kbps MP3. Its superiority as an *archival* format is entirely clear, and that argument makes more sense to me than “it sounds better”. Everything should support FLAC – if a superior format exists then I shouldn’t need to be using both in this day and age: that’s what irks me!

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