Oh lord. How long has it been without an update? My goodness. Anyways, here goes nothing.
There's exciting stuff going on! I've been working hard on tons of stuff. I've recorded, mixed and produced "Two Gents and a Scholar"'s brand new EP. I'm also working on "Migration of the Herd"'s full length album. There's been tons of soundtrack work, most with my involvement in TIGSource, specifically the Versus competition, where I scored four games! All of that is located at the bandcamp page. The games are great, and so are the soundtracks. On top of all that, I've went ahead and got a job at a local studio. The place is great, and I'm working with some great clients on top notch projects.
Murray's also been on the working end of things. He's recently gotten an internship, and created a brand new website for his design work. It's really cool stuff, and with the great skills that he's learned over the years, this site will actually be getting a complete retooling. That said, there probably won't be many updates here until the new site is completely up and running.
"We're Going to Hell for This" is getting pretty far into the current album. Even though it's taken a long time for it to come, we're rounding the corner with it. Honestly, from here on out it's just getting the right vocal takes and then mixing. Everything else is set in place. But, in the meantime, we'll be releasing a EP of a few covers that our band does, so go ahead and check out the Sweet Dreams EP. Feel free to donate to us using the donate buttons on this page too!
Hope you all are having a great summer. Expect great things from us in the near future, and the next time I give an update, you'll be staring at a brand new website. See you all then, whenever that is.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
New WGTHFT 2010 Songs!
So, Artemis has gotten more songs mixed. Here they are
Precognition
If I Am you And You Are Me
The Suite (15, Anti-Gang, Here We Are (Pt. 2))
Precognition
If I Am you And You Are Me
The Suite (15, Anti-Gang, Here We Are (Pt. 2))
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Experience
I recently read an article by Tim Rogers entitled Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore over on Kotaku. Before then, I had never heard of the man, and really didn't pay attention to anything on Kotaku other than whatever headlines seemed appealing to me. I'm sure this is completely expected of someone who subscribes to a news aggregator's RSS feed. However, now that I have, I expect to read all of Tim's future articles fully. That being said, what made me write this particular post is that after reading his Japan article, I realized that it was okay to complain. Now, I don't really want to complain so much as explain what went through my head and what still goes through my head when I think about Blind-Mind Studios. I spent a good amount of a time in their Dev Chat, at least enough that at one time I considered myself part of the dev team or part of the Blind-Mind crew. I feel like I still might be welcome there if things hadn't blown up as bad as they did in the last month, but I won't get into that; at least not yet. What I do want to do is tell you all about each member of the Blind-Mind development team. At least, tell you about them in the way that I perceive them now. Not that, I really don't mean this in any sort of animosity, and I really don't want it to feel like I have something I desperately need to get off my chest. I have no intentions of trying to put people in a bad light, and in fact I do want to say good things about each person - I indeed have good things to say. It's just that I feel some people who buy their games might want to know a little bit more about the people. Whether or not others view this team the way that I do is completely up to them. I just want to deliver my feelings of how I view the team, not pass judgment in any way. That being said, I should probably stop covering for myself and get on with it.
Firgof
Firgof was the one who initially contacted me about composing music. Actually, now that I think about it, contacted is a horrible word. By pure chance, I was in the OCRemix chat room when he decided to pop in and essentially do a call out to any musician who wanted to work on a game. By pure luck, I virtually raised my hand, and at first sent a piece that was completely inappropriate for Star Ruler in terms of genre. At that point I felt like I was done as a candidate, but after he mentioned it was a space game (I feel he may have mentioned the fact that it was a 4X in there somewhere, but at the time I had no idea what that meant) I quickly pulled out a little throwaway track I had created entitled simply, Spacer. This song is now on the soundtrack, and was only really worked on a little bit before being put into the game.
I think Spacer and Star Ruler are some of the most out of place tracks on the soundtrack because when I was told what they were looking for in terms of sound, they had literally said a militaristic space theme. To me, that meant snares, brass instruments, and flairs of synthesizers in there, all of which were almost completely alien to me at the time, though I had never mentioned that (at least I don't think.) This wasn't a miscommunication on their part though, merely me not digging enough. It wasn't until I asked what was currently in the game did I find out what they really wanted. They had been using some reference tracks from newgrounds up to the point - of which I was completely intimidated by because I didn't think I was nearly that good at the current time. In fact, I think it wasn't until this point that I had found out that Firgof himself made some music. And while I didn't want to say it at the time because I really wanted to work on the project, I was intimidated by a few things I had heard from him, and hoped that it was those once in a blue moon hits that all of us musicians have in our infancy. At least, that's my experience with composing music.
But anyway, back to the point. I always felt like Firgof was the one with the most back story to him. At least, he was the easiest to get talking about himself - mostly because it just naturally came up in conversation and didn't seem like prying. To this day, I feel like I know more about the things that surround and influence Firgof more than actually know him. Not to say that I'm fully fleshed out on the knowledge of what his home life is like, there's still miles and miles of mystery surrounding him. It's just that I can actually recall some of the things that I do know. I won't start spewing things out, but knowing that he lived with roommates - ones who I've actually had brief acquaintances with - and what he'd worked on in the past, college, experiences... it gave a somewhat vague definition of character. Just outright talking to Firgof doesn't really give you any impression at all of what he's like. It's not as if he's hiding it, it's just really hard to read someone over a skype voice conversation. In fact, when I saw his picture I had a hard time putting his voice to his face. But aside from knowing a little about him, he was always really easy to get along with. There really weren't any quarrels, and what few there were generally didn't feel very hostile. At least, not to me. What I do remember as one of the stand out things was that I could never seem to get a hold of Firgof after about half a year working with Blind-Mind. He turned from the go to contact to Mr. PR. And while doing his job is great, and seeing him snipe almost every comment that had a question stapled to it aimed at Star Ruler was pretty funny, there were times where I felt he might have been intentionally avoiding me because he thought I was annoying. I mean, I realize asking for feedback on songs a lot may seem like I'm just fishing to get my ego boosted a bit, especially since most of the time when he did respond it was either something along the lines of "I like it" or "I'd like to see where it goes", but I almost felt like I had an obligation to run everything by him first. There may not have been any need to in retrospect - only two songs were ever denied entry in Star Ruler, and one of them was a constant maybe that ended up being optional, but he always felt like a professional liaison. I consider that a good thing, and while I'll have something to say about this later, I think he did his job admirably well for what I think was his first time out in a truly professional setting.
GGLucas
What started as a one time joke about now having an intern I think turned into having someone who felt more apart of the team than I ever did. I mean, I can certainly see why. Lucas was a coder, and therefore was much farther intertwined into the whole working process. While I felt like part of the team at times, I also felt like an outsider whenever I wasn't in the chat or actively working on something for Star Ruler. Lucas seemed like as soon as he was accepted, somehow he had been there in the background for a while - maybe even since the project had started. He always seemed so quiet during the dev chats, though that may have been on account of whenever I was there and actually talking we seemed to trail off topic and Lucas was left a little out. I never wanted to do this, and it makes me feel a little strange that I had thought that all along while I was in the dev chats. Sometimes I had made small prods to get Lucas into the conversations, and while there were times when he had participated - particularly as time went on, it almost felt like he came out of his shell. I can't help but think now that there really was never any shell, and if my escapes into the dev chats only silenced him because I had invaded a working space where he truly shined. Maybe it wasn't so much that I had silenced him, but rather that he really didn't want to get involved with the foolry that I portrayed. A kind of maturity in the workspace deal. I think I respect that though.
In fact, there's a great deal of respect for Lucas. I don't think once I've had an argument with Lucas. It always felt more like academic debate rather. I feel I may have actually started conversing with Lucas when the irc chat was created, because he frequented it, and I had started to lurk because I always put the channel into my auto-join list. I don't remember too many long conversations before then, but there might have been. I don't think I'll ever really know if it was because the dev chat was the work place, or if it was easier to put his words down into text, or if he really did start coming out of his shell that made him actually actively talk to me at least. Now that I think about it, I must have had some conversations with him over skype that were more than just the general, because I have vague memories of it. It may just been my mind playing tricks on me since I'm writing this at 5 AM. What else am I going to do? Can't let good insomnia go to waste.
I think the only gripe I may have is his unexplained love for J-Pop. I can't stand it, but it seems to be a favorite of Lucas'. He says it's because he can't listen to distracting music while coding, but even then I don't think normal people would subject themselves to that stuff. It's almost like forced torture. I shouldn't judge though. There are a few things on my playlist that would make a few people roll their eyes. To each his own I suppose.
Reaper
Now, I thought about going into this and saying good things about Firgof and Lucas and then completely bad mouthing Reaper, but that would be bad form of me, and I would be a complete liar. Whatever personal tension I personally had over the dispute is gone, and there's a general sense of uncaring there. Apart from that, I'm also left to wonder a lot because of the outcome, and in particular a few of the events leading up to the explosion. I think the first thing I'll mention is the lack of my presence in the dev chat as soon as I had finished the soundtrack. I realize that I was no longer a part of the development of Star Ruler, but I kind of felt that I had earned a certain spot on the team, at least in spirit. I may not have been on his payroll so to say, but I kind of felt that the Blind-Mind dev chat was more than just a work office, and that it was like a bunch of friends just working on the game. That's why I had always gone into it with a very lighthearted attitude. I never meant any harm or intention to break work flow, but apparently Reaper seriously thought I was a major distraction and never acted professionally, even though I know there were points were I swear I was helping. It was at the point where he denied entry to the chat because they were working, and I just shrugged it off and said okay. I technically wasn't part of the team, and really didn't have any place there, but I can't help but wonder if all the time I had spent didn't mean much at all.
I suppose I should clarify a little bit. While I did work for Blind-Mind, I always felt like I made friends while doing it, rather than just collect business contact information. I have no idea now if the feelings were mutual, or if I sound like something of a moping idiot right now, but I kind of expected to stay with it, just because the environment like that was great. Though I had originally made initial contact with Firgof into this gig, Reaper was the person I feel I got along with the most. Though he never listened to the music, and never took anything I had to say seriously, the fact that I could come into the conversation and derail it a little bit always made me feel like I was the "take a break from work" person. I may have just been "ugh, this guy." Hence my initial confusion when the topic of the name of the PopStar Ruler album was enough to have him say that he wouldn't link to it. Well, to me, this was a bit of a personal hit. As far as I had known, Reaper was paying attention while I screwed around in chat, and even linked the album several times. So when it came around to release, and he would neither give me a news post or link to it, I didn't have a single clue as to why. He said it was because from a professional view point, he didn't want to associate himself with it. Now, the name's just a name. Blind-Mind Studios isn't a triple A company, and it wasn't going to suddenly make 3 million sales over night, so his reluctance again, just confused me. As an indie game developer, not only could he afford to associate himself with the name, but it was beneficial from the down to earth and with the people kind of perspective that naturally comes with being an indie developer. I'm sure even the guys at triple A studios have a little fun with their professional business from time to time. This was clear cut overreaction stamped all over it, because the name wasn't even the meat and potatoes of the product. The music was what he would be advertising. From what I had seen of Reaper, he didn't overreact, so this could only be something else. Hence why I took it personally.
For someone who thinks of themselves as uberprofessional, what happened next I found rather petty. While I did childishly escalate things by delivering the message "remove my tracks if you don't want to be associated with them" this came after I had talked to Firgof about the issue. I had sent the message through Firgof, and within a day, I had noticed that in the live patch notes all tracks were deleted, and all mention of my name had been erased off the site. My links from the media page, and link from the features page were gone (though original soundtrack! was still one of the features.) Not only that, but my soundtrack thread was unstickied and closed, but I was later even banned from the forums. To me, all of that screamed petty, and certainly not a way to respond. At this point, I figured I was right, that yes, it was personal, and removed the links to Star Ruler's Buy page from my two soundtrack pages. I think things took a really bad turn right at the start. It was enough for even Lucas to stick his head into it, though he didn't want to voice his opinions aloud. I didn't really blame him either though. This was between me and Reaper. I did eventually try to contact him through skype - though to no avail. I think he blocked me shortly after, and to this day it's still that way. It wasn't until I asked GGLucas to ask Reaper to put the tracks back in, and Reaper agreed that the issue was resolved. I feel like I may have caught him at a good time, because it seems like both GGLucas and Firgof fought for me in the dev chat they were most likely having. For that, I sincerely thank them. But this whole ordeal truly made me rethink the kind of person Reaper was. He even tried to make it seem like me taking down the buy page links were anything but a reaction to what he had done. I think as it stands right now, I'm still not listed anywhere on the Star Ruler website, and any regular traffic that I would have has all but stopped. Edit: Scratch that, I'm listed once on the Blind-Mind about page. I personally had no idea this page existed up until a few minutes ago. It's extremely out of the way, and no one gets linked from there to my music. Really not much of a consolation there. Now I really don't know how to speak of him but in his actions.
I think all of this might have stemmed from one real problem that I've noticed with Reaper. He's not good with PR or logistics. I see why Firgof was the one to handle all of that, because having someone as strong opinionated as that making the news posts and responding to people could potentially be that deadly. But at this point, I think it was more internal affairs, and seeing as he couldn't handle that well, I wonder what will become of Blind-Mind at the moment. Actually, I think it'll do fine, but I still feel like the possibility of a catastrophe because of him is there. Back when there was a second intern - I think his name was Ivan - Reaper had signed him on to do some coding. However, as I remember it, after a certain amount of time, things started to break, and Reaper went back and looked at what Ivan had done, only then realizing that a lot of things were broken, and now all of his changes needed to be reverted. I honestly think all of that could have been avoided, given that Reaper had actually looked them over. Edit: Firgof told me a few things to clear this up. I'll admit, I wasn't much in the dev chats that Ivan was in, so I really only saw a bit of the aftermath. It appears though that Reaper did in fact know about the breaking code and had told Ivan that it needed to be fixed, but Ivan had schoolwork and other things to take care of. I personally completely understand where Ivan came from, especially so early into his career. When we're in school we have a little more flexibility with how we approach work things. But the fact that Reaper had absolutely no idea where he was, that he'd disappeared, still makes me wonder a little bit. I think the blow up with me could have been avoided if Reaper had actually paid any attention to the tracks being put into the game, and the links to the bandcamp that Firgof had been aware of months before. I think where his lack in logistic skills really shows through to the crowd are the hot fixes that come in after almost every patch, and this is always due to a lack of testing before releasing the patch. I honestly don't think that Reaper makes a good project leader - at least not at this point. Whenever something doesn't go as planned, he's always got to fix it almost exclusively after the fact. I remember a few times when Firgof was supposed to send off a few important emails, but hadn't for whatever reason, and most of the time Reaper only found out after the emails were already late, and that's because he wasn't on top of things. I shudder to think of what would have happened if they were crucial and possibly make or break moments. Hopefully he'll get the hand of things though, and all of this is just a side effect of the company being so young. It makes me worry sometimes though.
The points on where I have seen him shine though, is obviously Star Ruler itself. Obviously without his vision and adamant attitude toward staying on course for it, Star Ruler would not exist, so I suppose he's got some of his leadership role down. He certainly knows how to code as well, there's no question toward that. And from what little I gained about his character when I thought I knew him, he seemed generous and in good spirits. I am a little sad to say that most of what I have to say about Reaper is in such a dim light.
I really would have liked to show off the entire team for the brilliance that they have, but I feel like the impression left in these last few weeks is too much to just look over. But, that being said, I also really would like to work with the team again. That seems entirely unlikely however, since effectively Reaper has stated that any professional relationship doesn't exist any longer. I think I'll be okay, seeing as I'm still in college and have plenty of opportunities ahead, and I do wish Blind-Mind plenty of it's own opportunities to grow and become a triple A studio someday. I really would like to see that. And hopefully it'll happen.
Firgof
Firgof was the one who initially contacted me about composing music. Actually, now that I think about it, contacted is a horrible word. By pure chance, I was in the OCRemix chat room when he decided to pop in and essentially do a call out to any musician who wanted to work on a game. By pure luck, I virtually raised my hand, and at first sent a piece that was completely inappropriate for Star Ruler in terms of genre. At that point I felt like I was done as a candidate, but after he mentioned it was a space game (I feel he may have mentioned the fact that it was a 4X in there somewhere, but at the time I had no idea what that meant) I quickly pulled out a little throwaway track I had created entitled simply, Spacer. This song is now on the soundtrack, and was only really worked on a little bit before being put into the game.
I think Spacer and Star Ruler are some of the most out of place tracks on the soundtrack because when I was told what they were looking for in terms of sound, they had literally said a militaristic space theme. To me, that meant snares, brass instruments, and flairs of synthesizers in there, all of which were almost completely alien to me at the time, though I had never mentioned that (at least I don't think.) This wasn't a miscommunication on their part though, merely me not digging enough. It wasn't until I asked what was currently in the game did I find out what they really wanted. They had been using some reference tracks from newgrounds up to the point - of which I was completely intimidated by because I didn't think I was nearly that good at the current time. In fact, I think it wasn't until this point that I had found out that Firgof himself made some music. And while I didn't want to say it at the time because I really wanted to work on the project, I was intimidated by a few things I had heard from him, and hoped that it was those once in a blue moon hits that all of us musicians have in our infancy. At least, that's my experience with composing music.
But anyway, back to the point. I always felt like Firgof was the one with the most back story to him. At least, he was the easiest to get talking about himself - mostly because it just naturally came up in conversation and didn't seem like prying. To this day, I feel like I know more about the things that surround and influence Firgof more than actually know him. Not to say that I'm fully fleshed out on the knowledge of what his home life is like, there's still miles and miles of mystery surrounding him. It's just that I can actually recall some of the things that I do know. I won't start spewing things out, but knowing that he lived with roommates - ones who I've actually had brief acquaintances with - and what he'd worked on in the past, college, experiences... it gave a somewhat vague definition of character. Just outright talking to Firgof doesn't really give you any impression at all of what he's like. It's not as if he's hiding it, it's just really hard to read someone over a skype voice conversation. In fact, when I saw his picture I had a hard time putting his voice to his face. But aside from knowing a little about him, he was always really easy to get along with. There really weren't any quarrels, and what few there were generally didn't feel very hostile. At least, not to me. What I do remember as one of the stand out things was that I could never seem to get a hold of Firgof after about half a year working with Blind-Mind. He turned from the go to contact to Mr. PR. And while doing his job is great, and seeing him snipe almost every comment that had a question stapled to it aimed at Star Ruler was pretty funny, there were times where I felt he might have been intentionally avoiding me because he thought I was annoying. I mean, I realize asking for feedback on songs a lot may seem like I'm just fishing to get my ego boosted a bit, especially since most of the time when he did respond it was either something along the lines of "I like it" or "I'd like to see where it goes", but I almost felt like I had an obligation to run everything by him first. There may not have been any need to in retrospect - only two songs were ever denied entry in Star Ruler, and one of them was a constant maybe that ended up being optional, but he always felt like a professional liaison. I consider that a good thing, and while I'll have something to say about this later, I think he did his job admirably well for what I think was his first time out in a truly professional setting.
GGLucas
What started as a one time joke about now having an intern I think turned into having someone who felt more apart of the team than I ever did. I mean, I can certainly see why. Lucas was a coder, and therefore was much farther intertwined into the whole working process. While I felt like part of the team at times, I also felt like an outsider whenever I wasn't in the chat or actively working on something for Star Ruler. Lucas seemed like as soon as he was accepted, somehow he had been there in the background for a while - maybe even since the project had started. He always seemed so quiet during the dev chats, though that may have been on account of whenever I was there and actually talking we seemed to trail off topic and Lucas was left a little out. I never wanted to do this, and it makes me feel a little strange that I had thought that all along while I was in the dev chats. Sometimes I had made small prods to get Lucas into the conversations, and while there were times when he had participated - particularly as time went on, it almost felt like he came out of his shell. I can't help but think now that there really was never any shell, and if my escapes into the dev chats only silenced him because I had invaded a working space where he truly shined. Maybe it wasn't so much that I had silenced him, but rather that he really didn't want to get involved with the foolry that I portrayed. A kind of maturity in the workspace deal. I think I respect that though.
In fact, there's a great deal of respect for Lucas. I don't think once I've had an argument with Lucas. It always felt more like academic debate rather. I feel I may have actually started conversing with Lucas when the irc chat was created, because he frequented it, and I had started to lurk because I always put the channel into my auto-join list. I don't remember too many long conversations before then, but there might have been. I don't think I'll ever really know if it was because the dev chat was the work place, or if it was easier to put his words down into text, or if he really did start coming out of his shell that made him actually actively talk to me at least. Now that I think about it, I must have had some conversations with him over skype that were more than just the general, because I have vague memories of it. It may just been my mind playing tricks on me since I'm writing this at 5 AM. What else am I going to do? Can't let good insomnia go to waste.
I think the only gripe I may have is his unexplained love for J-Pop. I can't stand it, but it seems to be a favorite of Lucas'. He says it's because he can't listen to distracting music while coding, but even then I don't think normal people would subject themselves to that stuff. It's almost like forced torture. I shouldn't judge though. There are a few things on my playlist that would make a few people roll their eyes. To each his own I suppose.
Reaper
Now, I thought about going into this and saying good things about Firgof and Lucas and then completely bad mouthing Reaper, but that would be bad form of me, and I would be a complete liar. Whatever personal tension I personally had over the dispute is gone, and there's a general sense of uncaring there. Apart from that, I'm also left to wonder a lot because of the outcome, and in particular a few of the events leading up to the explosion. I think the first thing I'll mention is the lack of my presence in the dev chat as soon as I had finished the soundtrack. I realize that I was no longer a part of the development of Star Ruler, but I kind of felt that I had earned a certain spot on the team, at least in spirit. I may not have been on his payroll so to say, but I kind of felt that the Blind-Mind dev chat was more than just a work office, and that it was like a bunch of friends just working on the game. That's why I had always gone into it with a very lighthearted attitude. I never meant any harm or intention to break work flow, but apparently Reaper seriously thought I was a major distraction and never acted professionally, even though I know there were points were I swear I was helping. It was at the point where he denied entry to the chat because they were working, and I just shrugged it off and said okay. I technically wasn't part of the team, and really didn't have any place there, but I can't help but wonder if all the time I had spent didn't mean much at all.
I suppose I should clarify a little bit. While I did work for Blind-Mind, I always felt like I made friends while doing it, rather than just collect business contact information. I have no idea now if the feelings were mutual, or if I sound like something of a moping idiot right now, but I kind of expected to stay with it, just because the environment like that was great. Though I had originally made initial contact with Firgof into this gig, Reaper was the person I feel I got along with the most. Though he never listened to the music, and never took anything I had to say seriously, the fact that I could come into the conversation and derail it a little bit always made me feel like I was the "take a break from work" person. I may have just been "ugh, this guy." Hence my initial confusion when the topic of the name of the PopStar Ruler album was enough to have him say that he wouldn't link to it. Well, to me, this was a bit of a personal hit. As far as I had known, Reaper was paying attention while I screwed around in chat, and even linked the album several times. So when it came around to release, and he would neither give me a news post or link to it, I didn't have a single clue as to why. He said it was because from a professional view point, he didn't want to associate himself with it. Now, the name's just a name. Blind-Mind Studios isn't a triple A company, and it wasn't going to suddenly make 3 million sales over night, so his reluctance again, just confused me. As an indie game developer, not only could he afford to associate himself with the name, but it was beneficial from the down to earth and with the people kind of perspective that naturally comes with being an indie developer. I'm sure even the guys at triple A studios have a little fun with their professional business from time to time. This was clear cut overreaction stamped all over it, because the name wasn't even the meat and potatoes of the product. The music was what he would be advertising. From what I had seen of Reaper, he didn't overreact, so this could only be something else. Hence why I took it personally.
For someone who thinks of themselves as uberprofessional, what happened next I found rather petty. While I did childishly escalate things by delivering the message "remove my tracks if you don't want to be associated with them" this came after I had talked to Firgof about the issue. I had sent the message through Firgof, and within a day, I had noticed that in the live patch notes all tracks were deleted, and all mention of my name had been erased off the site. My links from the media page, and link from the features page were gone (though original soundtrack! was still one of the features.) Not only that, but my soundtrack thread was unstickied and closed, but I was later even banned from the forums. To me, all of that screamed petty, and certainly not a way to respond. At this point, I figured I was right, that yes, it was personal, and removed the links to Star Ruler's Buy page from my two soundtrack pages. I think things took a really bad turn right at the start. It was enough for even Lucas to stick his head into it, though he didn't want to voice his opinions aloud. I didn't really blame him either though. This was between me and Reaper. I did eventually try to contact him through skype - though to no avail. I think he blocked me shortly after, and to this day it's still that way. It wasn't until I asked GGLucas to ask Reaper to put the tracks back in, and Reaper agreed that the issue was resolved. I feel like I may have caught him at a good time, because it seems like both GGLucas and Firgof fought for me in the dev chat they were most likely having. For that, I sincerely thank them. But this whole ordeal truly made me rethink the kind of person Reaper was. He even tried to make it seem like me taking down the buy page links were anything but a reaction to what he had done. I think as it stands right now, I'm still not listed anywhere on the Star Ruler website, and any regular traffic that I would have has all but stopped. Edit: Scratch that, I'm listed once on the Blind-Mind about page. I personally had no idea this page existed up until a few minutes ago. It's extremely out of the way, and no one gets linked from there to my music. Really not much of a consolation there. Now I really don't know how to speak of him but in his actions.
I think all of this might have stemmed from one real problem that I've noticed with Reaper. He's not good with PR or logistics. I see why Firgof was the one to handle all of that, because having someone as strong opinionated as that making the news posts and responding to people could potentially be that deadly. But at this point, I think it was more internal affairs, and seeing as he couldn't handle that well, I wonder what will become of Blind-Mind at the moment. Actually, I think it'll do fine, but I still feel like the possibility of a catastrophe because of him is there. Back when there was a second intern - I think his name was Ivan - Reaper had signed him on to do some coding. However, as I remember it, after a certain amount of time, things started to break, and Reaper went back and looked at what Ivan had done, only then realizing that a lot of things were broken, and now all of his changes needed to be reverted. I honestly think all of that could have been avoided, given that Reaper had actually looked them over. Edit: Firgof told me a few things to clear this up. I'll admit, I wasn't much in the dev chats that Ivan was in, so I really only saw a bit of the aftermath. It appears though that Reaper did in fact know about the breaking code and had told Ivan that it needed to be fixed, but Ivan had schoolwork and other things to take care of. I personally completely understand where Ivan came from, especially so early into his career. When we're in school we have a little more flexibility with how we approach work things. But the fact that Reaper had absolutely no idea where he was, that he'd disappeared, still makes me wonder a little bit. I think the blow up with me could have been avoided if Reaper had actually paid any attention to the tracks being put into the game, and the links to the bandcamp that Firgof had been aware of months before. I think where his lack in logistic skills really shows through to the crowd are the hot fixes that come in after almost every patch, and this is always due to a lack of testing before releasing the patch. I honestly don't think that Reaper makes a good project leader - at least not at this point. Whenever something doesn't go as planned, he's always got to fix it almost exclusively after the fact. I remember a few times when Firgof was supposed to send off a few important emails, but hadn't for whatever reason, and most of the time Reaper only found out after the emails were already late, and that's because he wasn't on top of things. I shudder to think of what would have happened if they were crucial and possibly make or break moments. Hopefully he'll get the hand of things though, and all of this is just a side effect of the company being so young. It makes me worry sometimes though.
The points on where I have seen him shine though, is obviously Star Ruler itself. Obviously without his vision and adamant attitude toward staying on course for it, Star Ruler would not exist, so I suppose he's got some of his leadership role down. He certainly knows how to code as well, there's no question toward that. And from what little I gained about his character when I thought I knew him, he seemed generous and in good spirits. I am a little sad to say that most of what I have to say about Reaper is in such a dim light.
I really would have liked to show off the entire team for the brilliance that they have, but I feel like the impression left in these last few weeks is too much to just look over. But, that being said, I also really would like to work with the team again. That seems entirely unlikely however, since effectively Reaper has stated that any professional relationship doesn't exist any longer. I think I'll be okay, seeing as I'm still in college and have plenty of opportunities ahead, and I do wish Blind-Mind plenty of it's own opportunities to grow and become a triple A studio someday. I really would like to see that. And hopefully it'll happen.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Zelda and WGTHFT
So, I've finally put my foot down into an Overclocked Remix project... more specifically the Link's Awakening one. It's a great project, and it's got tons of great tracks. I remixed Bottle Grotto. Anyway, here's a video of me playing the track in Audiosurf.
Also, here's a set of work in progress tracks for the WGTHFT album. It's really coming along nicely...
Also, here's a set of work in progress tracks for the WGTHFT album. It's really coming along nicely...
Thursday, December 23, 2010
PopStar Ruler
So, the time has finally come! The expansion to the soundtrack of Star Ruler is done now, and is available for free/whatever you feel like donating. Have at it people! I think this may be my greatest work yet!
Here's a video of me playing through the closing track on Beat Hazard!
In other news, the WGTHFT album is almost done in it's recording stage. We've re-done all of the acoustic guitars to get a much cleaner sound, and I'll have even more samples for you guys as things get a little more clean and done.
Here's a video of me playing through the closing track on Beat Hazard!
In other news, the WGTHFT album is almost done in it's recording stage. We've re-done all of the acoustic guitars to get a much cleaner sound, and I'll have even more samples for you guys as things get a little more clean and done.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Inertia
A new Star Ruler song! Yes, I'm working on another already. I love the sound of this one too. Also, if you will all look over to the new bandcamp for the expansion, there are a few tracks that I have no put out dev blogs for, so you can enjoy even more Star Ruler music.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
(Close to Perfection I think...)
Day 4
(I think it's done...)
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
(Close to Perfection I think...)
Day 4
(I think it's done...)
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Decagon
A new album!? What?! Yep, that's right. Why you may ask? Well, I like to clean my hard drive of music every now and then. I find some very interesting tracks that I had forgotten about creating. They're all strange in their own way... but its great to listen to them again, and more importantly, have an archive of them.
Click here or the image to download the free album! 94 MB, 26 tracks.
1. Breathe (Demo)
2. In The Air (Phil Collins Cover)
3. Crash
4. Whut?
5. Arp
6. The Monk's Song (Demo)
7. Grand
8. Hell No
9. Portnoy
10. Space Guitar
11. Touch
12. We Were Born To Fight (Demo)
13. Zelda
14. Scream
15. Trail
16. 146
17. Pulse (Star Ruler Reject)
18. Collab 1
19. Romantically Apocalyptic Ep. 1 Idea
20. Orestes (A Perfect Circle Cover) (Demo)
21. Snow
22. Something
23. Chromatic Works
24. Not Hover Battle
25. Collab 2
26. B Minor
Tracklist
1. Breathe (Demo)
2. In The Air (Phil Collins Cover)
3. Crash
4. Whut?
5. Arp
6. The Monk's Song (Demo)
7. Grand
8. Hell No
9. Portnoy
10. Space Guitar
11. Touch
12. We Were Born To Fight (Demo)
13. Zelda
14. Scream
15. Trail
16. 146
17. Pulse (Star Ruler Reject)
18. Collab 1
19. Romantically Apocalyptic Ep. 1 Idea
20. Orestes (A Perfect Circle Cover) (Demo)
21. Snow
22. Something
23. Chromatic Works
24. Not Hover Battle
25. Collab 2
26. B Minor
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