Novembeat 2022 plans

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My plan for Novembeat this year is to produce music that would be suitable for looping background tracks on video games. Ideally this would be driven by folks making music requests for their game jam games!

As always I’ll be releasing the album on my Bandcamp and my itch.io page. Most likely I’ll have Bandcamp just have the “soundtrack” version and itch have both “soundtrack” and “bgm” versions (where “bgm” will be suitable for looping, as opposed to “soundtrack” which will just play in one-shot mode).

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Co-op creative agency

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The best times in my career have been when I’ve been tasked with solving interesting problems or making single-serving things, rather than working on a single specific project in the long term.

I am really good with figuring out how to do a thing, but not so much with figuring out what to do in the first place.

I feel like my best career path would be some sort of consulting, or working for a creative agency. But I really do not like the actual work model involved in either of those things.

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Bayonetta and voice acting

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I’m not privy to any specific details about the situation between Hellena Taylor and PlatinumGames. The very public discourse around it is going through a very all-or-nothing no-nuance quick-takes cycle, as usual, and while I have personal opinions about Taylor along a number of axes, none of them are particularly relevant to the situation. (I will also not be buying Bayonetta 3, but only because I’m not a fan of the series to begin with, not because of this situation.)

The unfortunate thing is that people started rallying behind voice actors (and video game talent in general — there are many, many problems with how contractors and full-time employees are treated in the video games industry regardless of their role) and then the propaganda machine worked to tear down Taylor’s specific situation and, by proxy, all situations in the games industry.

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Focusrite 18i20: A quick review

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Yesterday my other big hardware upgrade arrived, a Focusrite 18i20 for my Mac mini in the studio, to upgrade the 18i8 I had before (which is now on the Mac Studio in the office).

The tl;dr: for most people the 18i8 is just fine and the 18i20 doesn’t really add anything. Consider the 18i20 only if you have a couple of fussy needs.

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Mac Studio: a quick review

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I got my Mac Studio yesterday, to replace the Mac mini in my office (the mini now replacing the 13" MacBook Pro in my recording studio, the MacBook Pro replacing the frustrating Lenovo laptop in the living room), and I have all my stuff set up on it. I went with the 10-core M1 Max model (with the upgraded GPU) and 2TB of RAM, sticking to the stock 32GB of RAM.

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My condo is finally sold!

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Yay, the big financial albatross is no longer around my neck. Now I can feel a lot more free to move forward with all of the projects I’ve been wanting to do, and not have to worry about, y'know, finances for a while.

I already feel a million pounds lighter.1

So anyway, time to start looking at redoing my kitchen.

Matrix Third Room

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Back when the VRChat debacle took place, I’d rambled quite a lot about the idea of a standards-based truly-distributed VR system. I probably mentioned how back in the day I was designing something like that, and was intending to use XMPP as the actual transport mechanism; in my more recent reevaluation of the idea I was thinking that using WebRTC to stream the actual realtime data (voice, character animation, etc.) would be the way forward.

Well, the Matrix folks just announced Third Room, which is the same basic concept, running on Matrix and WebRTC! They’ve also made a bunch of other great technology choices along the way.

This is pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. At least from a 20,000-foot view it hits all of the right notes for me. For example, using glTF for all object interchange, focusing on in-world editing, and allowing for (apparently optional) world persistence.

Hopefully this can disrupt the stranglehold VRChat has on social VR and will also be a fun, compelling experience in its own right.