Without their help things like random music drop outs would be a common occurrence. Jeff Lake and Kain Shin did a fantastic job of meeting our needs and even making them top priority. If you reach the limit the oldest sound dies out (polyphony), our problem came with realizing that a random sound would die out. Think of a voice in a game much like that of a synthesizer. One of the main issues was running out of voices. Once we really started going we ran in to an incredible amount of technical hitches. Mike Behrman did a great job of scripting our assets in and using the metronome despite an INCREDIBLY complicated process that is required to get things to work. In fact they almost create a song amongst themselves. In Mushroom Men all of our world sounds are rhythmic. In fact I found that the more obvious I made it the better the aural experience was. At first I was hesitant to make the metronome uses obvious but I found out in time that it didn't really matter. We began creating assets for the newly developed areas and began "abusing" the metronome features. The day I moved down I had a quick meeting with Les Claypool and gave him the parameters that we were working under (120 BPM). After our team moved down to Austin we had a lot to do to get the Spore Wars in shape. The team all got on board with the idea and the real work began. My wife and I came down to Austin for a visit and I showed the Red Fly team the "Metronome". The idea faded out (of course) until I built a mock up demo using the early build that demonstrated how this would all work. After six or so margaritas we came up with the idea of putting the entire world on a BPM. The Red Fly guys came down to Dallas to do some recruiting at the Guild Hall and we caught up that evening at a local Mexican Food restaurant. Sometime around October 07 those two very things happened. Pushing the boundaries At this point Jimi Barker, Bob Arlauskas and I knew that if Mushroom Men was to become something special we had to break out of the restrictions that most contract game audio companies operate under and truly become part of the team. It was a rush job and we still didn't fully understand what Mushroom Men was to become. I think we did 90 sounds in three days (a typical sound designer does around 5 to 7 a day). Honestly, looking back at it our first round of sounds they were absolutely terrible. At the time we knew the project was cool but it was so early and our relationship with Red Fly was so new that we stayed very safe and within the bounds of very traditional game audio. We handed the sounds back over to Red Fly and they implemented them (this was in August of 07). We had worked on a lot of games before so we did our typical pass and gave the hero some footsteps, jumping sound, etc. The project started with us downloading an extremely early build. However after we started to realize how deeply involved we were going to be we knew that a move to Austin was on the cards. When the project first came up the G元3k team was based in Dallas, Texas, (working with Chris Sabat under the name Okratron 5000). Walk before running These days creating an entire audio package for a brand new IP is rare, that's why when a chance meeting became a big opportunity the G元3k crew leapt at it.
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