Life After JC Denton

The man behind the voice of JC Denton, the star of Warren Spector’s universally-acclaimed cyberpunk cult favourite Deus Ex (a game consistently ranked by many as one of the greatest ever made), is not who you expect.

That man is Jay Anthony Franke – former star of Saved by the Bell contemporary California Dreams, voice actor of JC Denton and longtime video game fan and QA tester.

Franke now lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a QA tester for Firemonkeys (previously Firemint before its merger with Iron Monkey Studios) mainly focusing on the Real Racing series.

Originally hailing from Leonardtown, Maryland, Franke spent 20 years in Los Angeles and Las Vegas trying to make it in the world of acting.

“I was auditioning for about five to seven years before I actually got California Dreams,” says Franke. “It was tough, because I was just a teenager at the time and I was working nights so I had the time to spend my days auditioning.”

Franke’s night job was as a DJ at a karaoke bar and nightclub. Not a bad night job as far as these things go, but being a teenager had its limitations.

“People would come and buy me drinks even though I was underage, and being young and stupid I thought it would be fine,” he says. “My boss said it was okay to drink sometimes, but it just got to a point where we didn’t see eye to eye on that.”

“Obviously I was the idiot in that situation, and suffice it to say we eventually parted ways.”

After going through a long and arduous audition process for California Dreams, Franke got a “good-news-bad-news” phone call from his agent. At the same time he had auditioned for the John Waters film, Serial Mom.

“I ended up getting a call saying I got both of them, but I could only do one,” says Franke. “I made the logical choice and went with the series because it had potential to [be on] for much longer.”

“Am I happy with the choice? I really don’t know. It’s impossible to tell how it would have gone the other way, so it is what it is. Either way, working on California Dreams was the best time of my life.”

Despite the fact that California Dreams has been off the air for more than 20 years, there are still fans who remember the show fondly. One such fan is NBC late night talk show host, Jimmy Fallon, who was happy to reunite the cast to celebrate the show’s anniversary in 2010.

“It was a really cool experience,” says Franke. “They flew me out to New York from Australia and put me in a nice hotel for a few days.”

California Dreams ended its run after five years and 80 episodes. No more table reads, rewrites, dress rehearsals or live audiences. So what was next?

In 1997 Franke, an avid gamer, picked up a job at Activision after he discovered his roommate had begun working there and the company was still hiring.

Mere weeks later Franke discovered video game quality assurance was not the job he thought it was, but persisted regardless. Since beginning in QA Franke has served on a variety of games, including Tenchu, Quake 2 and Quake 3, several iterations of the Tony Hawk series, and Interstate ’76 (which he claims is “one of the best games ever made to this day.”)

Franke also worked on the ill-fated Daikatana which, in his words, was “interesting.”

Then came Deus Ex and JC Denton.

“In Deus Ex I think I had about 11,000 or 14,000 lines of dialogue or something like that. It stacks up when you’re doing the main character and his brother [Paul Denton],” says Franke.

This was Franke’s first voice acting gig; it all came about from being “pretty chummy” with the game’s audio producer who was among the many at Ion Storm aware of his former Hollywood life.

“Being JC Denton was amazing, and it’s great, because I feel like I’ve been through a lot of gaming milestones throughout my career,” he says. “Even being involved with something like Daikatana, I just feel proud being able to say I’ve been there, and I had something to do with these tent pole moments.”

Franke describes the process of bringing JC Denton to life. It’s just what you would expect. One man in a booth and another talking through a headset coaching the actor on how each line should sound.

“It’s odd,” says Franke. “Because I know all these lines, but it could mean anything. It’s not until you get that direction that it all fits into place.”

Luckily for Franke, given that he was also working QA on Deus Ex, his audio wasn’t added to the mix until later in the process.

“When I was testing it I played through it hundreds of times, but I didn’t really hear my voice until it was done. I was pleased about that, because I didn’t have to drive myself insane by hearing my own voice that whole time.”

Franke remains a fan of the Deus Ex series and was excited to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution when it was released last year. Franke thought it was a great follow-up to the original overall, but does have one issue.

“[In the original Deus Ex the player could] solve situations in any number of ways. With Human Revolution, though, I found that there were certain augmentations that if I didn’t have them, I wasn’t getting through,” he says. “I found myself saving my points then making a save, then if I couldn’t pass a section, I’d go back, change my augmentations and retry.”

Since his stint as JC & Paul Denton, Franke has mainly stuck to QA.

“I like things that are reliable at the moment. Acting and voice acting just aren’t,” he says. “If it falls in my lap one day that would be great, but for right now I have to take care of things, which means I need a steady paycheck.”

Most recently, Franke returned to the sound booth while playing the role of Randall Ezno in the Mass Effect iOS spinoff, Mass Effect: Infiltrator. He has also developed a concept for a show with his wife called Bonaparte’s Army, which is currently sitting on the backburner.

For now, however, Firemonkeys and video game QA is Jay Anthony Franke’s wheelhouse.

“I’m at a point right now where I think that I’ll either stick with this for a while longer or I’ll go out and do something else,” he says. “If something comes along or I see something I want to do then I’ll do it, otherwise I’m good.”

This article was originally published on IGN.

Creating Audio That Matters

“Immersion” has become cliché. It’s often just another buzzword when talking about how great a game is, but it’s all too infrequent that those discussing games will actually break down the finer details of what that immersion entails.

Like all pieces of the puzzle that is game design, audio must work in concert with graphics and game mechanics to help immerse the player into gameplay experiences of all shapes and sizes through its ability to convey vast amounts of the detail to the player, often without their knowing.

J White, Martin Stig Andersen, and Thom Kellar, of Visceral Games, Playdead, and Freshtone Games respectively, are three sound designers who have ample experience in creating such audio experiences.

It’s Mental

“It can be easy for the media to reveal itself if you’ve got a sound loop or something that becomes annoying. As soon as the game reveals the mechanics, the media and the machinery behind these things is ruined and the player is thrown out of the experience,” said Martin Stig Andersen, sound designer and composer onLimbo.

Limbo was a critical success and fan favorite in 2010, putting many end-of-year awards under its belt.

It was lauded for its striking visual aesthetic, but part of its success came from its ability to make the player feel a sense of isolation and foreboding that is largely the result of top quality sound design.

Andersen and Limbo‘s director, Arnt Jensen, teamed up after Andersen saw the game’s initial trailer and felt his unique area of music (electroacoustic music, a non-commercial, almost entirely funding-based form) would add to the experience.

“I watched the trailer and I was really captivated by [the boy's] expressions,” said Andersen. “It reminded me of the aesthetics of light and sound; you have something recognizable and realistic, but at the same time it’s abstract.

“It’s the same as what I love about how we use sound. We have all these slight references that focus on ambiguity, so it’s more about what the listener imagines, rather than what I want to tell them.”

The whole three-page feature can be found on Gamasutra

Yager Bombs: Rebooting Spec Ops for 2K

Yager Development is somewhat of an anomaly, having been around for 13 years, but only shipped two games. With Yager’s recent release of Spec Ops: The Line in conjunction with 2K Games, Yager Development’s managing director, Timo Ullman talks about the past, present and future of the company.

“The name of the studio is what it is because we had trouble coming up with something creative,” says Ullman. For those curious, the studio’s first game was a flight combat game on Xbox and PC called Yager. Which they developed. It’s really that simple.

“We talked about the consequences of if Yager would tank, we would have had to rename the studio,” he continues. “But luckily that wasn’t the case.”

Yager Development has existed in its current form for 13 years (although the five original members started meeting and making games back in 1985), and is now a studio with approximately 100 employees. Yager, the game, was released in 2003 in Europe and Australia, and 2004 in the United States, after which the team decided it was time to move on to “next gen” systems, given they were on the horizon at the time.

This transition took some time. It included analysing its current toolset and determining that the Unreal Engine would better suit its needs, and coming up with new game concepts that would reach more consumers. As the flight combat genre more or less dried up after the Rogue Squadron series ended, Ullman noted the shift towards shooters and character-based action games we see so frequently today.

“We had a project in pre-production that unfortunately got cancelled with another publisher,” says Ullman. “We did a couple of technical projects on the side too, which weren’t necessarily gaming related. Yager sold pretty well, but not enough for us to carry a studio for the next three years.”

It was these non-gaming projects that helped keep the studio alive and move forward, remaining in business until a more solid project went into production.

“As a gaming company, you learn a lot about – and it’s a buzzword that I don’t really like, but – the gamification of interfaces, like how you need to construct the menu for people to respond to it in a fluid way. So we took these things we learned in games and applied them to other types of industries,” says Ullman.

Production of Spec Ops: The Line didn’t kick off into full swing until 2007, and initially, it wasn’t even a Spec Ops game. “We had approached 2K in 2006 with a project of our own, which was a third person game with squad and cover mechanics,” said Ullman.

While 2K liked the initial pitch, unbeknownst to Yager, they had internally green-lit the revival of Spec Ops, and asked if the developer would be interested in re-pitching a game in the Spec Ops realm.

The rest of the article can be found at GamesIndustry International.

Facepalm Games hopes to be the next big Indie Fund success story

When you’re two young guys from Helsinki, Finland, it can be hard to get your game a) funded; b) noted by the public; and c) finished. But Facepalm Games’ The Swapper is hoping to do just that after February’s announcement that it is being backed by Indie Fund.

Facepalm Games is primarily the work of two people, Olli Harjola and Otto Hantula. Neither has much game development experience, with Harjola developing some minor personal projects, and Hantula’s experience being limited to mods and Counter Strike maps.

Despite this, the pair — who are also being helped out by a third team-member, Carlo Castellana and occasional freelancers — have struck a chord with The Swapper. The sci-fi puzzle/platformer “is inspired by films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris,” said Facepalm’s Olli Harjola. It has been in development for about three years in total, but only the past seven months have been full-time, as the game has gathered momentum and development ramps up towards release.

In The Swapper, players take control of a character exploring a space station, carrying a gun which gives them the ability to clone themselves wherever the cursor is pointing. This mechanic allows players to traverse the terrain, navigate obstacles or fall safely from great heights, and is set around “a story about treating human beings as objects.”

Other than this main gameplay mechanic, one of the main features separating The Swapper from the pack is its art, which is almost entirely handmade and, contrary to what Facepalm’s April Fools Day joke would lead you to believe, has not changed.

“I experimented with many different art styles. The clay animation wasn’t the first idea I had, but I hate 3D modelling,” said Harjola. “I think the interfaces can be really bad and I find myself getting caught up in navigating the technical side of it instead of actually creating.”

“I had made some clay animations before, so I figured I could take some photos of clay, then make normal maps to help with lighting and other effects. It was a long process, it took me months of experimenting with different styles, but I’m happy with the end result.”

Currently, Harjola and Facepalm Games is grateful for initiatives like Indie Fund which is “literally funding us to be able to work on the game.”

Indie Fund — started by a group of successful indie developers to help further the growth of new, up and coming indie developers — and the Facepalm team initially crossed paths at IndieCade 2011, where The Swapper won the show from a selection of over 40 submissions and 10 finalists.

While Harjola wasn’t willing to discuss the finer details of how much is being provided by Indie Fund, previous titles funded by the group show that Indie Fund has an eye for success, after recouping its $90k investment in Q.U.B.E. in only four days, and Dear Esther‘s $55k investment in a mere six hours.

According to Harjola, Facepalm is currently hoping to put some of the money towards providing a better audio experience for The Swapper. Until now, “all money spent on the game was from our own savings. Anything we won from festivals hasn’t actually helped, because of the travel costs involved it actually eats into our funds.”

Now that development is in full swing, Facepalm’s next challenge is trying to capitalise on the publicity opportunities offered by being involved with a high-profile group like Indie Fund.

After the initial Indie Fund announcement was made, the news was reported in many high-profile media outlets, but Facepalm Games didn’t have the manpower to take advantage of the situation.

“It’s just really hard when there’s so few of us. We’re so focused on working on the game that we just don’t have the time to spare to do all the media and marketing work we need to do,” said Harjola. He does, however, recognise the importance of dedicating time towards this closer to the end of their development cycle.

The Swapper is currently being developed for PC/Mac with Facepalm Games hoping for an early 2013 release.

Article originally posted on Gamasutra

Is Guild Wars 2 the answer to stagnant MMO design?

While the MMO genre has been set in its post-World of Warcraft ways since Blizzard released its market-leading online game 2004, ArenaNet is trying to go its own way with Guild Wars 2.

“We’re finally seeing a point where companies realize that they’re not going to create the next great MMO by just copying what’s come before,” said Christopher Lye, global brand director at ArenaNet, who believes the definition of an MMO has come to mean games that follow a similar quest and combat structure to World of Warcraft.

“‘MMO’ is a platform and set of technologies, not a game design model – and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible … Honestly, I think the problem is that there’s been a lack of change in MMO design and that Guild Wars 2 is a reaction to that.”

Guild Wars 2 — which has no firm release date yet — will be taking neither the subscription nor the free-to-play routes, instead opting for the one-off payment packaged products just like 2005′s Guild Wars and its expansions, except this time, backed up with microtransactions.

Running with this model for Guild Wars, ArenaNet was able to keep a regular flow of income through selling expansions. The result of this led to a refined production pipeline which allowed the team develop and deliver their content very quickly.

The rest is at Gamasutra

Mass Effect iOS dev’s careful approach to expanding EA’s biggest franchises

For a team that developed Apple’s iPad Game of the Year, was nominated for a BAFTA, and has made some of the best received iOS adaptations of console games, IronMonkey Studios doesn’t often enter the public conversation.

The Melbourne, Australia-based studio’s list of iOS games includeMirror’s Edge, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Dead Space, and most recently, Mass Effect: Infiltrator, which was released to coincide withMass Effect 3 on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Initially a work-for-hire studio, IronMonkey has always made games for Electronic Arts, and was purchased by the publisher in 2010. EA and BioWare sought out the studio to create Mass Effect: Infiltrator after its success with Dead Space.

Having a close working relationship with Mass Effectcreator BioWare was key to expanding the PC and console franchise to the mobile space. “We worked really closely [with BioWare], especially at the beginning and the end,” Jarrad Trudgen, design director at IronMonkey, told Gamasutra.

But a certain amount of freedom let IronMonkey make its own unique game. “Once we nailed down who our character was, the setting, and the basic beats we had to hit in the story — our three acts — [BioWare] left us to it for quite a while. We’d check in every now and again, but from there we developed the script, we cast all the actors, and we did the voice-over recording here in Melbourne.”

Given the events of Mass Effect: Infiltrator run parallel with those of Mass Effect 3, IronMonkey had to ensure its game fit in with BioWare’s canon. “They’ve got such a huge, well realized universe that there’s a lot of stuff to consider about how we fit in with continuity and such,” Trudgen said.

He added, “So there’s a lot of close work there … We didn’t just get a big dump of everything, though. Because everything is so vast, it was more that as things came up we got clarification from [BioWare]. They were always really supportive and helpful.”

Read the whole article at Gamasutra