5 DAYS TO GO! LET'S TALK TO BRIAN!
almost 8 years ago
– Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 10:01:43 PM
The MFL Kickstarter campaigns ends in 5 days
We just hit our Halftime Mini Game stretch goal last night! Michael has asked for everybody to post your big ideas of what would be a
fun halftime show in the comments of the "113K" post on our Facebook page. He's going to pick a couple
winners. He's not sure what you'll get yet, but it will be something
good.
Meet the Mutant in Charge of Game Audio
Mutant Football
League is very lucky to have one of the best audio guys in the business working
on it and that guy is Brian Schmidt. Brian has worked on a ton of video games
including NARC, Desert Strike, Madden, & Crueballand. He is quite a legend in the
industry. Let me paint a quick picture on Brian’s accomplishments, of which there
are many.
Brian was also the
guy who did all the audio on the original Mutant League Game. Don’t ask how I
was able to get Brian to join this project, but let’s just say we are good friends
and I made Brian an offer he could’ve easily refused but didn’t.
1) Tell us a little about yourself and what games you’ve worked on?
I’m coming up
on 30 years composing for games; I started doing music and sound for games back
in 1987, working for the Chicago pinball company, Williams Electronic Games.
(Side note: I love pinball and have been playing since I was a kid—I discovered
that the fact that I was a really good player helped me land the gig!). One of
the games I was fortunate enough to compose for was NARC, which at the time was
considered pretty cutting edge graphics. I left Williams and decided to go
freelance, continuing to do pinball machines, but I also started doing games
for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (Megadrive). I did several games for EA
including several years of Madden, the Desert Strike series, Crueball and…
Mutant League Football! After about 10 years freelancing, I moved from Chicago
to Seattle where I was the main architect of the audio system for the Xbox—doing
a lot of audio technology stuff, where I also did the original console’s
startup sound. Having decided that 10 years at Microhard—err Microsoft--
was enough, I went back to freelance music and sound as www.BrianSchmidtStudios.com
and also started a conference on game music and sound design, GameSoundCon (www.GameSoundCon.com),
which I have a blast running. Although I loved my time at Xbox, it felt good to
be composing and doing sound design again.
2) What it was like creating the sound and music for the original Mutant League
Football?
Mutant League Football was awesome. I always loved working on Genesis games – the sound
system is actually quite cool for a 90’s game console, and with enough
tweaking you could get a pretty rocking sound out of it. Back then, game
audio was limited by how much memory we could allocate for it—that’s why there
isn’t a ton of digitized sound samples in the original MLF and is also the
reason that some of the in-game sounds get re-used in the main theme. MLF is of
course where I first met designer/producer Michael Mendheim and we hit it off
really well – we had very similar notions of what sound in the Mutant League
should be, and he also was great about letting me give it ‘my own sound’, while
still ensuring that the music and sound fit into his overall vision of the
game. It was really fun to be able to ‘let me hair’ down on a console
football game, compared to what I’d been doing for Madden. Hard to believe that
was almost 25 years ago!
3) What is your role on the new Mutant Football League?
I’m the audio
director, and also the composer and sound designer. So in a lot of ways, it
feels like the ‘old days’ when one person would be responsible for the entirety
of the audio package. Of course things are more complex, and I rely much
more now on our audio programmer than I did in the old days, but the tools are
also light years ahead of where they used to be.
4) Mutant Football League is a different game from the original game. How will the
musical direction be different?
I think the
phrase “spiritual successor” is spot on. While there is obviously a lot of
influence from the original MLF, Mutant Football League is definitely its own
game with its own vibe. Musically, I wanted to bring things a bit more
mainstream football, while still maintaining the heavy/rock roots of the
original. So in addition to rocking guitars, bass and drums, I’ve brought in some
“sports brass” and a bigness that just wasn’t possible with the small synth
chip in the Genesis. The individual team themes are all pretty heavy rockin’,
but with some fun, too.
The whole sound
design is a completely different vibe from the original, and here’s where, as
much as I loved doing Genesis games, making a modern PC and console game is
really a whole lot more fun. Obviously moving from synthesized Genesis
music to studio-recorded music was awesome. I brought in a couple of great
guitarists, Cain German and Forrest Roush, and I’m playing live bass and all
the other virtual instrumental parts. We have a complex, interactive crowd,
huge ‘in your face’ tackles, explosions, chain saw and other special SFX.
We’ve got well over a thousand lines of dialog, which lends a ton of
personality to the game. Wow, to have had the ability to do this for the
original… (which, if I recall correctly, had an audio memory budget of about
64kilobytes TOTAL).
5) You’re in Seattle. The Dev team is in Kiev. Michael is in Chicago. How does this all work? What’s the process like?
Seattle, Kiev
and Chicago - welcome to modern video game development! The workflow is really
quite smooth. I’ve always got a current build of the game, and can make music
and sound changes generally without having to get too much time from the
programmers in Kiev. If I do need to get some coding changes done, a quick
email or entry into “jira” (our common bug/task database) means that usually
within a day, I have a new build of the game with the changes incorporated. So
the process is pretty streamlined, and it doesn’t really feel like we’re all
separated by thousands of miles across several time zones. IN fact, it’s not
really all that different from when I was working back in the 90’s; Although I
was in Chicago, many of the games I worked on were being programmed in
California, Florida, Japan… Of course, we didn’t have 150Mb internet back then!
6) Anything else you want
to share with the MFL Community?
I’m super excited to be working with Michael again—the original MLF was
one of the projects I had the most fun on in the 90’s, and I’m very, very happy
and grateful to have been asked to be part of the team. I’m having a ton of fun
using the tools and tech available in a modern video game to re-imagine what it
might have been like had the Genesis had about 10,000 times the processing
power and memory. I mean, seriously, how often do you get a chance for a remake
like that?
Today is Wednesday, March 1 and that means there are only 5 days left in our Kickstarter campaign.
We are steadily marching towards the end of our stretch goals field. There are only four left for us to bust through, but
the
clock is ticking. We don't want our drive to stall
during
this final week, so we are asking all our fans to help push us over the
line. If every backer contributes just $5 extra, it will put us on the goal line,
and in perfect striking distance
to score the Full Season!
MFL NEWS UPDATE
almost 8 years ago
– Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 09:28:53 PM
We’ve got a lot
of things cooking and here’s the lowdown on all things Mutant Football.
MFL IS AT
GDC!!!
We’ve headed west to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco! will
be on exhibition and available for demonstrations during GDC 2017 at GDC Play
Booth #PL4228 in San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center from March 1–3.
Michael will try to answer as many messages as possible but there is definitely going to be a drop off in message response this week. Very sorry about that but we are trying to get as many eyes as possible on the game and GDC has our schedules maxed out from morning till late night. So please bare with us this week. We will be driving everyone we talk to
YOU GUYS WANTED
BACKERKIT AND YOU’VE GOT IT!
We are
currently putting together our Backerkit. This will allow the community to add
on items to their existing pledges. Some of the items we are considering for
add ons are the following:
- The
Digital Game
- T-Shirts
- Alpha
Access
- Retro
Genesis Cartridge
- PC
Box with DRM Free Disk
- All-Start
4” Statue
- All-Star
3” Statue
- 35mm
Player Figurine pack (includes skeleton, orc, alien and robot)
- Name
a Player
- Name
an All-Star
Please let us know if there is anything you want that we're missing.
WHAM NEUTRON TO
APPEAR IN INDIE ASSAULT
And there’s
more! We’ve teamed up the guys at Imagination Vent LLC who are creating a cool
fighting game titled: Indie Assault. Indie Assault is a fast paced platform fighter with advanced techniques. The characters are pulled from exciting indie games, and show off several of their signature moves in their distinct and visually stunning play styles
We proud to announce that one of our MFL
characters will be appearing their game as a fighting character.
“It is with great enthusiasm that QB Neutron of Mutant Football League
tackles into Indie Assault. It meant a great deal to us to have a partner
working on a sport video game to showcase the physical intensity of their
athlete in our up-coming eSport title. Along with QB Wham Neutron he is
accompanied by two stages related to the football stadium to bring the
pain!" - Jared, CEO & Biz Development Director: Imagination Vent
“We’re very excited to include All-Star Quarterback Wham Neutron into
Indie Assault. When He’s not throwing Touchdown strikes, Wham likes to dance
and bust heads. So he’s very eager to join the cast and crew of Indie Assault
and do some damage. Wham just signed a legally binding document, promising he
will only bust heads and not dismember them. We at Digital Dreams Entertainment
LLC are looking forward to this mash-up with Imagination Vent LLC, but we take
no responsibility for whatever carnage Wham may do.” – Michael Mendheim,
Creative Director
ONE WEEK LEFT!
almost 8 years ago
– Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 02:45:29 PM
MFL Kickstarter campaign Ends Next Monday, March 6 at 11:59pm CST!
To all our Backers, and the whole MFL community... THANK YOU!!!
You have made this Kickstarter campaign such a huge success. We were very nervous to pull the trigger on the campaign, because we've had difficulties in the past with crowdfunding, but you all have shown us that we had nothing to worry about. You want to play Mutant Football, and you want to be a part of it; you want to be involved. We couldn't ask for better fans than you MFL Fanatics!
So now we have 1 week to reach the Full Season stretch goal bonus. We want to ask all our Backers to continue spreading the word about this Mutant Football League Kickstarter campaign.
Those of you that are fans of the original Mutant League series, find your old school friends that you used to play it with and make sure they know. Those of you that are fans of the Blitz games, tell your buddies that this plays like Blitz but with monsters that you can kill with a chainsaw. You millennials that are new to the MFL experience, do your magic on social media: post a explosive hit on SnapChat, tell your Uber driver, even tell your Tinder date.
Remember to tell them that they can play the Sneak Peek Preview demo right now on Steam when they back the campaign at any level, even at $1! They'll get to experience bribing the ref, killing the ref, the new Alien players, and now even perma-death! They'll be blown away that it's still just pre-alpha! Make Some Noise! Let's crush that final stretch goal like a Ginormous orc lineman making sure the opposing quarterback sees the dedication on the bottom of his new cleats!
bit.ly/MFLkickstarter
And don't forget, the MFL team will be showing off the game at GDC Play this week in Booth #PL4228. If you are attending the Game Developers Conference this year, stop by and get a hands-on with The MFL experience.
