Happy Father’s Day!

One of the things driving me forward in my career is the encouragement of my parents. Although my choices rarely depend on their approval, I’ve nonetheless felt it has been there through most of my adulthood. Today, I want to tell you about my Dad. For anyone who didn’t get to meet him at my wedding, he’s equal parts comedian, muse, mad scientist, and older/wiser clone of me. He stowed a Harry Potter wand in his glove compartment, in case people cut him off in traffic and he had to Crucio a fool.

A fine fingerstyle guitarist, banjo picker, bass player, and singer, he taught me never to stop learning, to always be curious, and that sometimes people will think you’re nuts, no matter how hard you try to explain yourself, and that’s okay. It was following in his example that I became a self-taught musician. After a childhood during which he and Mom could easily have justified shipping me one-way to Mogadishu, I have grown up to feel mighty proud of all the good he’s done — not just for me, but for hundreds (thousands?) of students.

The local newspaper had this to say about him, last year:

Sixth-graders at Hammocks Middle School can’t wait to get to their science class. Walking up the stairs with anticipation, they already can hear their teacher, Harvey Kaufman, warming up.

Kaufman has been teaching science for 14 years at Hammocks Middle, 9889 Hammocks Blvd. When school began this year and he was faced with a less-than-desirable textbook, Kaufman searched for a way to increase interest in learning. While outlining his next lecture, the words on the paper formed into a song, and he grabbed an upright bass. Immediately, he had his first song, Heart of the Matter. Since then, Kaufman has been combining his passion for teaching science with his love for playing the guitar and creating a series of songs that teach his students basic scientific concepts.

I think it’s pretty easy to see how this kind of mindset has affected me, and made it clear that I can do anything I set out to, as long as I do it passionately. Now, conveniently, it’s my turn to make my Dad proud:

Red Faction Guerrilla, my first big next-gen console game, is now in stores, with ads all over TV. It is an action game set on Mars with a destruction simulation that antiquates anything seen before. The game is based around the fact that you can destroy any structure — no hiding place is safe, no building too fortified — and when you do, it breaks apart realistically, not in a pre-determined manner, but with real physics. Glass raining down, rebar everywhere, clouds of dust. It is literally a summer blockbuster.

For an audio team, this is a huge challenge. On top of the normal list of sounds any game needs, we had to design and perfect a system that hooked into the physics simulation, and create a massive array of breaking, crunching, rolling, tearing, shearing, and shattering noises for each type of material. Buildings groan audibly under stress, bridges create a hellish racket as they catastrophically fail, and each chunk of concrete makes its own distinct smack as it rains down on the rusty Martian landscape.

If you can’t already tell, I’m extremely passionate about this game, and highly satisfied with the results. I did the following things:

- Collaborated with Raison Varner, Dan Wentz, and Josh Davidson (all current or former in-house Volition sound men) to compose all of the in-game music. Tim Wynn scored the titles and cinematic cut-scenes with a live orchestra, and I tied his various themes back into the in-game music, so the whole presentation was cohesive and flowing. Music4Games wrote an article featuring the score.

- Revised, mixed, processed, and implemented all of the above music. We used a Raison-designed interactive music system which reacts to how badly you’ve pissed off the bad guys at any given time. It transitions between spacey underscore and two intensities of heroic combat. Each of these, in turn, consists of dozens of segments several bars long, which traverse a flowchart semi-randomly. It was important to write each segment with this in mind, since you never know which of 6 other segments may come next. There are several distinct “collections” of segments, each with about an hour of material, which are introduced as the story unfolds. I also wrote 6 shorter but more intense “collections” to get your blood pumping when you’re engaged in a mission, and for a certain activity where you race a timer to inflict property damage.

- Did a ton of sound design under my freakishly energetic coordinator Kate Nelson, who organized everything from music to voice acting under ridiculous pressure. I made sounds for weapon firing and handling, “clutter object” collisions / explosions / ambient noises, multiplayer “backpack” power-ups, the main destruction system which is the centerpiece of the game (polishing and revising Raison’s first pass), the little fanfare that plays on the news kiosks (the notes spell out the name of the game’s villains, or “EDF”), and various odds and ends.

- Stress-tested functionality of music and sound with the help of programmers Steve DeFrisco and Aaron Gresch, and ultra-skilled QA Testers Kelly McMorris, Mike Bianca, and Kristi Kaufman, who ensured that few audio bugs were shipped in the final game, and that I kept my sanity.

So, Dad, it’s my hope that by relishing every minute of life, using the talents I inherited to their fullest, and loving my family throughout challenges and celebrations alike, I can make you feel justified not only for the twinkle in your eye in 1980, but for resisting the near-daily temptation to drive us to the Everglades and throw me to the alligators. Happy Father’s Day!